Gandhi & Churchill (42 page)

Thoroughly frightened, everyone gave way. Gandhi won a wage hike (although not the 33 percent increase he had hoped for), and the press carried the glad tidings around India. Gandhi became a hero not only in the villages of Bihar and Gujarat but in factories and sweatshops from Ahmedabad to Calcutta and Bombay.

“There is no mistaking the fact that India is waking up from its long sleep,” Gandhi told the editor of the
Bombay Chronicle
on April 15, 1918. To his mind, he had proved that his formula worked: inspire local activists to unite the community around a specific issue or injustice, then confront authority through nonviolent petitions, pledges, demonstrations, and strikes. The events in Kaira and Ahmedabad had inevitable political echoes as well. They proved that “it is impossible to govern men without their consent,” he declared. India’s peasants had shown that “no Government, no matter how strong, can stand against their will.”
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Gandhi was a hero to some Indians. Others reacted with resentment, anger, and envy. That local police officials saw him as a troublemaker, even a fraud, is not surprising.
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But many Indian politicians also found him aggravating. His unconventional tactics seemed “inopportune and mischievous.” Some in the Congress worried that his focus on local grievances detracted from the larger national questions of independence and self-government.

Annie Besant was particularly bitter. She had reason to be. Gandhi’s satyagraha in Kaira infringed on turf that she and her Home Rule Leagues had cultivated for a year. She too had tried to reach across caste divisions; she too had stressed organization on the local level in places that elite Congress politicians never touched. The Home Rule Leagues had pioneered what Gandhi was able to carry out with far greater success, at their expense.
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Only the government’s disastrous decision to intern Besant for subverting the war effort in June 1917 restored her waning political fortunes. She would be elected president of the Congress when it met in Calcutta, as Gandhi’s star rose across India but the Home Rule Leagues were losing their luster.

Other nationalist politicians were fading in public esteem, too—an ironic development, because events in London were sharply turning in their favor.

As the Great War in Europe dragged on, the Raj found itself walking a thinner and thinner tightrope. Harvests in India had been bad in 1917–18 (one reason for the agitation in Kaira); those of 1918–19 would be worse. At the same time war demand drove up prices, imposing a severe hardship on the average Indian, even as their sons left for war in record numbers. More than 1.1 million Indians went overseas to serve in campaigns in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and France (almost 140,000 fought on the Western Front), as well as in Gallipoli and East Africa—all at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.
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Indian troops participated in the disasters at Gallipoli and the fall of Kut-al-Amara in 1916, as well as the Battle of the Somme. They saw the indomitable British suddenly stumble and fall. At the same time chaos threatened on the Afghan border. Discontent simmered in India’s major cities. The burden of war had broken Russia’s back and forced it out of the war. What if India’s broke as well?

The government in Westminster felt it needed to do something, fast. Their notion was to throw Indian politicians a bone, something to convince them that their sacrifices for the empire were not in vain. On August 20, 1917, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu announced in the House of Commons that His Majesty’s Government had a program of action to include more Indians in governing institutions, “with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India, as an integral part of the British Empire.”
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Never have duller words been more ill chosen or set off a longer and more intense controversy. Later, hard-liners like Churchill would blame the liberal Montagu for unreasonably raising Indians’ hopes for self-government—even independence. In fact, as historian Penderel Moon has pointed out, the program originated with Montagu’s Tory predecessor as secretary of state, Austen Chamberlain; and the words “responsible government” came from the two great hard-liners in the cabinet, Lord Curzon and A. J. Balfour. They had wanted to avoid using the phrase “self-government” and assumed that “responsible government” would be more innocuous and vague.
⁵⁵

In fact, the phrase had a distinct political meaning, as Congress’s London-trained lawyers (including Mohandas Gandhi) well knew. In the context of British constitutional history, “responsible government” could only mean a governing executive directly responsible to the elected representatives of the people; in other words, an elected Indian parliament. It was the very same formula that Winston Churchill had worked out for the “self-governing” colonies of Natal and Transvaal in 1906 and the South African republic in 1909. Now for the first time, Montagu seemed to suggest, that formula would be applied to a nonwhite colony, namely India.

Words were important to Indian politicians. In a crucial sense, words were the only thing they had to work with. Verbiage mattered far less to their British counterparts. The British public was neither dismayed nor shocked by Montagu’s announcement; it felt that India deserved some reward for its sacrifices and support during the war. In fact, the Montagu declaration revealed something crucial that few Indians realized: that most Britons were perfectly ready to let Indians govern themselves,
as long as they stayed in the empire.

By 1917 many agreed with the sentiment that Viceroy Lord Minto had expressed ten years earlier, when he and John Morley approved the first elected members for India’s legislative councils. “We are mere sojourners” in India, Minto mused. “We are only camping and on the march…How intensely artificial and unnatural is our mighty Raj. And it sets me to wondering whether it can possibly last.” With dramatic emphasis he added, “It surely cannot.”
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Conservatives like Lord Curzon, and Britons with a vested interest in British rule, might deplore this resigned attitude as “defeatism.” Later Winston Churchill would try to reverse it. However, it remained a political fact: the British public could not have cared less who governed India or how. And with war still raging in Europe, they had other things to think about. Yet the paradox remained that Montagu’s invitation to India self-rule sowed confusion and panic not in England, or even in New Delhi, but among India’s political elite.

At first the reaction was rapturous excitement, certainly more than the declaration warranted. Indeed, the only politician to ignore it was Gandhi, just as he ignored the announcement that Montagu would be coming to India in September. Gandhi was unconcerned about when the
British
thought Indians were ready for self-rule—in his view, that was up to the Indians. When he wrote on August 24, “It would seem what we have been fighting for is within our reach,” he was talking not about Montagu or independence but about the protests for the release of Annie Besant from her internment.
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Gandhi had recently taken up her cause and sent a letter to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford. He confessed, “I myself do not like much in Mrs. Besant’s method” and “I have not liked the idea of the political propaganda being carried on in the War. But,” he added, “the whole country was against me.”
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She deserved not to be in prison, however wrong-headed her ideas and words were—indeed, Gandhi rejected Besant’s entire nationalist vision, along with everyone else’s. Formal institutional arrangements like parliaments and local councils meant nothing to him. Later he would write, “The average individual’s soul force is any day the most important thing. The political form is but a concrete expression of that soul force.”
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Home Rule, he told the Gujarat Political Conference, was pointless unless the Indians were fit for it.
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He had his own ideas about how to bring that about. It led him, in the spring of 1918, in the aftermath of his victory in the Ahmedabad satyagraha, to make one of his most controversial moves.

He had at first refused to attend the Delhi War Conference, organized by Viceroy Lord Chelmsford at the end of April 1918. For one thing, neither Besant or Tilak, vocal opponents of the war but crucial figures in Indian political opinion, had been invited. For another, he had read a rumor that Britain would cede the Turkish capital of Constantinople to the Russians after the war, which would deeply offend Indian Muslims.
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However, on April 27 he met personally with Chelmsford and decided to go.
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In November Gandhi had also met Montagu during the latter’s Indian tour. The secretary of state was amazed to find Gandhi “dressed like a coolie” but added that he was a “social reformer” who sincerely wanted “to improve the conditions of his fellow-men.” At the same time he saw that Gandhi could be helpful in building support for the empire: “All [Gandhi] wants is to get India on our side.”
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The war conference showed Gandhi how to do it. In Europe the Western Front was collapsing; German forces were closing on Paris. The fate of the war, and Britain, seemed in doubt. In Kaira Gandhi had worried that “as a responsible citizen of the Empire” he was doing nothing to help Britain win the war. “I feel ashamed that since my arrival in India I can show no war work record in the conventional sense of the term,” he said. So he proposed to help recruit soldiers for the war effort. As he told the viceroy’s private secretary, “I have an idea that if I became your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men on you.”
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Later he hoped to qualify for a posting to France or Mesopotamia himself.

Gandhi threw himself into the recruiting drive, returning to Kaira in hopes of recruiting twenty men in each village. “Of all my activities,” he wrote, “I regard this as the most difficult and the most important.”
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For Gandhi still believed in the ideal, if not the reality, of the British Empire. The English “love justice,” he told an audience in Kaira. “The liberty of the individual is very dear to them. They have shielded men against oppression” in India and elsewhere. Now was the time for Indians to step up and show their gratitude—and their courage.
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It would prove that they were ready to be equal partners in empire. “To sacrifice sons in the war ought to be a cause not of pain but of pleasure to brave men,” he announced.
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The spectacle of the self-declared pacifist and man of
ahimsa
urging recruits not just to serve as ambulance drivers, as he did in South Africa and London, but to fight at the front startled many. It bewildered his closest supporters like Patel, who refused to help. Opponents like Besant marveled and scoffed at “the Raj’s recruiting sergeant.” In Congress circles it made him appear even more of an outsider than before.

But Gandhi was unyielding. “I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice at this critical moment,” he told Lord Chelmsford, “and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favored partner in the Empire, and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past.” To a friend he wrote, “If I succeed, Swaraj is assured.”
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So Gandhi marched from village to village, sometimes covering twenty miles a day, from May until July. He had hoped for twelve hundred recruits but ended up with fifty. When he spoke of dying for the empire, the crowds of peasants who had hailed him as their savior turned their backs and walked away. Others turned violent. He left some villages to the clatter of thrown rocks and stones.

Few understood Gandhi’s motivation, then or later. Certainly he never thought the English might concede self-government out of gratitude—his experience in the Boer War had taught him otherwise. But he did believe war service would restore a strength of will to the Indian character that was critical for Swaraj. He even hoped his sons Ramdas and Harilal would join the army.
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His English disciple and fellow pacifist Charles Andrews was furious and charged him with abandoning India’s heritage of peace and humanity. Gandhi sharply responded, “On the contrary, [Indians] have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike down the enemy.” Satyagraha itself required a soldierly instinct, he pointed out. He could state it even more strongly: “You cannot teach
ahimsa
to a man who cannot kill.”
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Besides, Gandhi added, “I do not say, ‘Let us go and kill the Germans.’ I say, ‘Let us go and die for the sake of India and the Empire.’” To his mind, this was a crucial distinction. As always, Gandhi’s focus was on the importance of manly self-sacrifice. Army life would teach that strength of character, just as it would teach the other qualities Indians needed for the future: discipline and teamwork, not to mention hygiene and clean latrines. One reason he cheered the Allied cause in the Great War was that he was convinced its Indian veterans would return home changed men, as “an indomitable army of Home Rulers” ready to reshape India in a new muscular image. “I am absolutely right…in calling upon every Indian to join the army,” he told Andrews, not in order to gratify “the lust for blood” but “for the sake of learning not to fear death.”
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Even years later, when he reflected on this episode, he wrote, “I do not repent of my actions in terms of
ahimsa
. For under Swaraj too, I would not hesitate to advise those who would bear arms to do so and fight for their country.” To Andrews he was more direct: “It comes to this. Under exceptional circumstances, war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil, even as the body is.”
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