Gandhi & Churchill (46 page)

Under these political pressures, Churchill and Montagu could not actually fire Dyer, but they could get him forcibly retired. For the next month and a half Churchill tried to bully, cajole, and strong-arm the Army Council into agreeing. Sir Henry Wilson fumed in his diary: “[Churchill] tried again to rush a decision to remove Dyer from the Army saying it was only a matter of form…but the more he argued the deeper I put him into the muck heap,” by saying it would be unfair to Dyer without a formal hearing, which would take months.
⁴⁸

Churchill knew he did not have months. Finally the Army Council agreed to issue a statement that Dyer “cannot be acquitted of an error in judgement” but should not be retired, merely informed that he would no longer be employed in India. The statement was a defeat for Churchill, but the cabinet agreed to accept it.
⁴⁹
Even this mild step was so controversial that the government agreed to let the decision be debated in the House of Commons.

The crucial confrontation was set for a hot afternoon on July 8, 1920. In the House gallery sat none other than Dyer himself, who had returned to England to try to clear his name. Sitting with him were his wife and the governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, along with a row of maharajas. Edward Carson was to take the lead on the floor for the opponents of the Army Council decision, while Secretary Montagu was to speak for the Army Council and the Lloyd George government. Churchill was slated to speak last, or next to last.
⁵⁰

A deep feeling of antipathy toward Montagu ran throughout the House, not just because of Dyer. For many Tories, there were really two questions up for debate. “First, Is it English to break a man for doing his duty?” J. L. Maffey wrote afterward. He had been sitting next to Dyer in the sweltering gallery. The second question on everyone’s mind, Maffey wrote, was far nastier: “Is a British general to be downed at the bidding of a crooked Jew?”
⁵¹

In truth the race prejudice was steeply against Montagu as he rose to defend Dyer’s dismissal. He didn’t do much to help his cause. All observers agreed he became unnecessarily emotional and bitter at the constant heckling and interruptions. At one point Montagu angrily blurted out, “Are you going to keep your hold on India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination?” This prompted angry catcalls of “It saved a mutiny” and “What a terrible speech” even from his own benches.

“I have never seen the House so fiercely angry,” Austen Chamberlain wrote, “and [Montagu] threw fuel on the flames.” Chamberlain could not resist adding his own racial dig—“A Jew rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves—that was the feeling”—as the government’s spokesman on Amritsar unexpectedly became its greatest liability.
⁵²

Finally, exhausted and overwrought, Montagu sat down. He had virtually ruined the government’s case. Edward Carson then rose and ripped the government, raising shouts of applause as he called Montagu’s actions “un-English” (another racial dig). Meanwhile the government’s leader of the House, Andrew Bonar Law, did some hard thinking. He had intended for Churchill, who knew the case backward and forward, to sum things up at the end of debate. Bonar Law was no Churchill fan. But now he decided to send Winston in directly after Carson, in hopes he could save the day.

As Carson sat down to raucous cheers, Churchill rose to his feet. The atmosphere was tense, almost explosive. In addition to airing ancient resentments over India, the House had just shown the ugly face of anti-Semitism. Privately Churchill must have been horrified. Whatever his views on race, there was not an anti-Semitic bone in his body. Like his father and also like Gandhi, he was happy to count Jews among his closest friends and warmest political supporters.
⁵³
Now he needed to quell that antagonism before it boiled over.

“There has not been, I suppose, for many years a case of this kind,” he began, “and which has raised so many grave and wide issues.”
⁵⁴
Churchill declared that he wanted to discuss the Dyer case “in a calm spirit, avoiding passion and avoiding attempts to excite prejudice” or race feeling on both sides, because such a case required “a judgement of exceptional seriousness, delicacy and responsibility.”

Churchill then took a quarter of an hour
⁵⁵
to explain that being pushed into retirement was the mildest formal punishment that Dyer could expect, considering what had happened. “This is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire,” Churchill said, his voice rising as his eye ranged around the now-silent House, “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.”

Every military officer facing a large crowd must make painful decisions, he said, such as whether to fire, not on an enemy, “but on those who are his countrymen, or who are citizens of our common Empire.” Even then an officer may be justified in shedding blood in order to save lives or restore order.

But under any circumstance, Churchill said, it was a British officer’s duty to avoid anything that smacked of frightfulness: “What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.” Churchill then calmly but remorselessly reviewed the facts.

How Dyer had fired into a crowd that was “not attacking anyone or anything,” a crowd trapped in a confined space virtually without exits; a crowd so densely packed that a single bullet was able to pass through and kill or wound three or four people.

How Dyer first ordered his men to fire into the center of the crowd; then when the people fled to the sides, he ordered them to fire on the sides.

How the firing went on for eight to ten minutes, with soldiers loading and reloading until their ammunition ran out. Churchill read aloud the testimony of one of Dyer’s subordinates, stating that “if the road had not been so narrow, the machine guns and the armored cars would have” been brought to bear as well.

Churchill paused to let the point sink in. Then he continued: “We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or other, that this is not the British way of doing business.” This was the kind of atrocity the Germans had committed in the last war, the kind of “bloody and devastating terrorism” employed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks and their “criminal regime.”

To fire on an armed crowd was one thing, Churchill said: “Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.” But at Amritsar Dyer had violated every principle that Churchill believed Britain stood for: “The august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.”

He then added words that Gandhi supporters would use against him years later. “Our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone,” Churchill declared. The real basis of British rule was “cooperation and goodwill” between the two races—which, he added, Montagu’s trip to India in 1917 had gone a long way to restoring. To wreck that cooperation and goodwill by allowing Dyer’s action to go unpunished or unremarked would be “one of the most melancholy events in the history of the world.” What was needed now was to “to keep alive that spirit of comradeship, that sense of utility and progress in cooperation, which must ever ally and bind together the British and Indian peoples.”

Churchill sat down. The House sat silent, impressed in spite of itself. One of the spectators in the gallery, H. A. L. Fisher, called the speech “excellent, cool, but with imaginative touches.”
⁵⁶
Others agreed. Pro-Dyer speakers followed. Sir William Joynson-Hicks read aloud a letter from a British woman in Ahmedabad, saying “the prompt action of General Dyer in the Punjab saved our lives.” Another MP ripped into Churchill as the man “responsible for the loss of more lives than any man sitting in this house”—a reference to Gallipoli.
^*65
57

But Churchill’s speech carried the day. The final vote approving the Army Council’s action was 230 to 129. Of the negative votes, 119 came from members of the government’s own coalition.

Dyer left stone-faced, his wife in tears. His career was over. So was Montagu’s. But Churchill had raised himself to a new level. “To me Winston is by far the most interesting speaker in the House,” said Austen Chamberlain’s brother Neville, even before the speech.
⁵⁸
The Amritsar debate gave Churchill the reputation for eloquent oratory that could save an issue—or even a government.

Churchill would make many speeches in his long career, speeches that are justly celebrated and more famous than the one on July 8, 1920. Most biographers barely mention the Amritsar debate. But a strong case can be made that it was in fact his greatest speech. Churchill kept his usual rhetoric flourishes, which read well in retrospect but often fell flat with a listening audience, to a minimum. Every paragraph conveyed not only a cool persuasive power but a depth of moral perception that had been totally lacking in the younger Churchill (and, some might argue, that would be lacking in the later one).

Even more strikingly, Churchill had barely mentioned Dyer by name. He made no effort to tear the general’s character down or castigate those who defended him. Instead, he simply and calmly recited the facts. “If we take care of the facts of a case,” Gandhi liked to say, “the law will take care of itself.”
⁵⁹
By doing just that, Churchill showed his skeptical audience that what they had assumed was unjust persecution of an officer doing his duty was in fact “a moderate and considered” verdict on a murderous act—an act that, as Churchill put it (quoting Macaulay), exposed “the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy.”

In the final analysis, what radiates from the speech is a sense of humanity as well as justice. From Churchill’s perspective, that was what made the British Empire different from its successors. On this point he agreed wholeheartedly with Gandhi: that the empire’s entire claim to loyalty rested not on its material strength but on its moral authority. “All the world is looking towards this country” for leadership, he told a British audience earlier in February, and “the leading position in the interest and respect of the nations of the world” depended on power devoted to justice and truth.
⁶⁰

Gandhi had his own term for it: “soul force.” For once, Gandhi and Churchill were on the same side. And if the Amritsar speech was not Churchill’s greatest speech, from a moral point of view it was certainly his finest hour.

In India, the effect of Churchill’s speech and the House vote was also stunned surprise, but for precisely the opposite reason. A white officer had deliberately ordered more than a thousand unarmed Indians to be shot; he and his superior, Michael O’Dwyer, had beaten, arrested, and humiliated hundreds more. Yet the British government refused to punish Dyer and O’Dwyer, or put them on trial, or even utter a word of public censure. Few if any Indians cared that Churchill had fought hard to carry the case as far as the Parliament was willing to go. In fact, that was precisely the point. For millions of Indians, the Amritsar debate marked the point of no return. In the heat of outraged emotion, any lingering respect for British rule evaporated.

Jawaharlal Nehru was the son of the Congress leader Motilal Nehru and a young lawyer at Delhi’s High Court. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he barely spoke a word of Hindi. He was the perfect example of Macaulay’s “Indian in blood and color but English in taste and intellect.” The events at Amritsar shook him deeply. Earlier that December Nehru had crossed paths with Dyer on a train and listened with horror as Dyer boasted to his fellow white officers how he had almost put rebellious Amritsar to the torch “but he took pity on it and refrained.”
⁶¹

Later Nehru would recall his rage of hearing the news from Westminster. “This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly,” he later wrote. “It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent, to use public school language,” the Harrow graduate wrote, “it was the height of bad form.”
⁶²

His father was affected even more. Jawaharlal’s daughter Indira was only three when she watched her grandfather Motilal, the distinguished loyalist Moderate politician, pile up his British furniture in the garden of his house on a humid August evening and set it alight. As the flames caught and crackled, he began throwing his European clothes into the bonfire. Out of the closet came ties, collars, hats, jackets, trousers, and shoes. A lifetime of conforming to the rules and models of the Raj all went up in smoke. From now on Motilal Nehru would wear only homespun clothes,
khadi,
which had become a symbol of Indian independence—and also of Gandhi’s Swaraj movement.
⁶³

Gandhi was similarly outraged. In
Young India
he wrote of Dyer, “His brutality is unmistakable. His abject and unsoldier-like cowardice is apparent in every line of amazing defence before the Army Council.” For Gandhi, Dyer’s most unforgivable failing was that his panic, and the resulting massacre, had been “unsoldier-like,” a violation of the kind of manly discipline embodied by the traditions of the British Army and the empire.

Gandhi also believed that the greatest crime committed in Amritsar had not even been mentioned by Churchill and the parliamentarians. This was the “slow torture, degradation, and emasculation” of the crawling order and the floggings of innocent passersby. The authors of these deeds “deserve greater condemnation than General Dyer for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The latter only destroyed a few bodies but the others tried to kill the soul of a nation.”
⁶⁴