Gandhi & Churchill (47 page)

On August 1, 1920, Bal Gangadhar Tilak died, the last male politician in India who still enjoyed more public prestige than Gandhi.
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That same day Gandhi returned his South Africa War and Kaisar-I-Hind medals to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford with a note, saying the actions of Parliament and the New Delhi government “have estranged me completely from the present government and have disabled me from tendering, as I have hitherto tendered, my loyal cooperation.”

Gandhi sensed the moment to act had come. He had the outrage of an entire subcontinent on his side. In a few days he would launch his largest and most sweeping satyagraha campaign, to force the government to confront its sins. Others still had their doubts about Gandhi’s tactics and about his chances of ultimate success. But Gandhi had a secret ally, an alliance spawned, as it happened, on the bloodstained beaches of Gallipoli.

Chapter Fourteen

NONCOOPERATION

1920–1922

This Empire is guilty of so many crimes that living under its flag is tantamount to being disloyal to God.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, DECEMBER
1920

It amazes me that Gandhi should be allowed to go undermining our position month after month and year after year.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, OCTOBER
1921

O
N
A
UGUST
1, 1920, G
ANDHI FORMALLY
launched his Noncooperation campaign against the Raj. The issue around which he intended to rally support was neither the Rowlatt Acts nor the Hunter Commission report. It wasn’t even the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Instead, his headline issue was the fate of the caliphate, or
Khilafat,
in far-off Constantinople.

To many it seemed a baffling move. The overwhelming majority of Hindus had never even heard the word, let alone had an opinion on it. Yet the Khilafat question was crucial to India’s Muslims, and Gandhi had quietly but publicly embraced it for nearly a year. Turning it into his next major public issue was not only a matter of personal principle but a shrewd political tactic. In fact, it gave him his first nationwide coalition. Churchill’s Gallipoli invasion and the ensuing breakup of the Turkish Empire had inadvertently allowed Gandhi to outflank and rout his opponents in the Congress. In less than six months he would stand at the organization’s helm.

How could this seemingly recondite issue, one consistently ignored by Gandhi’s biographers, have turned him into India’s most powerful politician? The answer lies in the history of the Muslim community in India since the Mutiny.

For decades, India’s Muslims had felt increasingly vulnerable in an increasingly alien world. They had always been a minority, hardly a fifth of the population.
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They were devout monotheists among people who practiced a religion that Muslims considered an abomination. The British victory in 1858, by abolishing the Mughal Emperorship, had stripped away their one shred of ancient dignity, the Muslim claim to formal political supremacy over a Hindu majority.
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Indian cities like Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta had large Muslim neighborhoods. Muslims were also a sizable presence in the Punjab, where they lived side by side with Hindus and Sikhs, and they formed the majority in the states of Jammu and Kashmir. But most Indian Muslims lived in the rural areas of eastern Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces, and the rugged provinces of Baluchistan and the Sind in northwestern India. Everywhere they carried the stamp of poverty and backwardness. In every sector of the new India, from education to business ownership and economic status, not to mention the ability to find jobs in local government and the civil service, they lagged far behind Hindus and minorities like the Parsis.
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As World War I ended, Indian Muslims felt doubly betrayed. On one side, the Allies had waged war on the sultan, the leader of their faith and
Khalifa,
or defender of Islam’s holy places, and had systematically dismantled his dominions. “The Indian Mussalman’s heart,” wrote spokesman Muhammad Ali, “throbs in unison with the Turk of Stamboul, who has to watch an act of shameless brigandage with impotent rage.” On the other, Viceroy Lord Chelmsford and Secretary Montagu were giving away concessions to Hindu nationalists that promised to leave Muslims in the dust.
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Warnings that Muslim loyalties to Britain were being strained to the breaking point carried little weight in London. The New Delhi government also shrugged off the increasingly pan-Islamic anti-British ideology of men like Abul Kalam Azad, editor of the Urdu journal
al-Hilal,
and Muhammad and Shaukat Ali. As long as life went on normally as before, and Baluchi and Punjabi troops in the Indian Army remained loyal, the Raj was undisturbed by the undercurrent of Islamic resentment.

Only one man understood the desperate Muslim dilemma and offered to help. This was Gandhi. Muslim-Hindu cooperation was the hallmark of his South African experience, where he had worked with Gujarati and Bengali Muslims, even Afridis and Pathans, toward a common purpose. It was the same in Champaran, where his old chum Maulana Mazharul Haq was connected to pan-Islamic circles. “We are Indians first,” Gandhi liked to say, “and Hindus, Mussulmans, Parsis, Christians after.”
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By October 1919 Gandhi had become the Muslims’ leading advocate in Hindu political circles.
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That included the Khilafat issue. Azad and the Ali brothers wanted New Delhi to insist that London leave the defeated sultan enough temporal power to discharge his duties as protector of Muslim sanctuaries, above all in Arabia.
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Gandhi publicly signed on to their cause in September 1919 and endorsed the first Khilafat Conference the next month, which established October 17 as Khilafat Day, a day of hartals and shop closings.

Gandhi’s message to his fellow Hindus was simple: If an issue is important to our Muslim brothers, then it should be important to us. As he always insisted, “The key to success in our fight is unity.” Gandhi mobilized his remaining satyagrahi behind the October 17 action and became fast friends with radicals like the Ali brothers. They in turn offered their support and followers to Gandhi, as a reserve army for his future satyagraha campaigns.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but always between consenting adults. As 1920 dawned, a strange but potentially powerful coalition had taken shape. Gandhi, as usual, saw things in the broadest and most universal terms, with an eye to the future. “I am uniting Hindus and Moslems,” Gandhi wrote to his son on May 4, 1920. “I am coming to know one and all and, if non-cooperation goes well, a great power based on brute force will have to submit to a simple-looking thing…My
moksha
lies through them.”
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The Khilafat satyagraha was to be only one prong of his new offensive. Gandhi decided it was time to aim his campaign directly at the politicians and their principal hangout, the Indian National Congress. That August he traveled with Shaukat Ali around the country, speaking of “the Satanism” of the British government and adding that “this Empire has been guilty of such terrible atrocities” that, if it did not apologize to God and the country, “it was the duty of every Indian to destroy it.” By betraying the Muslims on the protection of their holy places and slaughtering Hindus at Amritsar, the Raj had lost any claim to loyalty or honor. Gandhi declared that satyagraha was the “only effective remedy” for “healing the wounds” caused by the British betrayal.
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Gandhi arrived in Calcutta for a special session of the Indian National Congress scheduled for September 1920, with his forces arrayed behind him.

His key aides were Rajendra Prasad, Vallabhbhai Patel, and a new disciple, thirty-one-year-old Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. A Brahmin born in a village in Tamil Nadu, in south India, he held a law degree from Madras and had a deep love of English literature. He had been a typical nationalist lawyer, linked first to Tilak and then to Annie Besant—until he met Gandhi. Gandhi, he would say later, saved him from choosing between terrorism and cynicism.
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Nicknamed Rajaji, he would become the third of Gandhi’s Three Musketeers, the Mahatma’s closest inner political circle.

Gandhi also had his Muslim advisers, the Ali brothers and Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, a stalwart of both the Muslim League and Indian Congress, and a former Lucknow Pact enthusiast who now hoped the overthrow of British rule in India would trigger anticolonial movements around the world.
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Another ally was the Congress’s elder statesman, Motilal Nehru. He was older than Gandhi, born in 1861; his father had been a police chief in Delhi when the Mutiny broke out. Nehru belonged to the previous generation of Indian politicians and nationalists, the generation of Tilak and Gokhale. He had been radicalized by the tragedy of Amritsar. Motilal Nehru had been president of the Indian National Congress when it happened and, like his son Jawaharlal, went from being a Gandhi skeptic to a devoted supporter. Dressed in khadi, his white mustache stiff with dignity and outrage, he and another Congress stalwart, the Bengali C.R. Das, would be crucial to guiding Gandhi’s ambitious program through the special session of the Congress.

All the same, none of it would have happened without the Muslim activists who flocked to Calcutta from all across India, as well as Hindu and Muslim farmers from Gujarat and Bihar. For most, it was their first entry into mainstream politics and the hallowed sanctuary of the Congress. At Gandhi’s behest they took their seats at the special session and simply overwhelmed the more experienced elites. On the program committee, for example, the contingent from Madras (no Islamic stronghold) were almost all Muslims and fiercely pro-Gandhi.
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Gandhi announced his plan in open session. It was complete and total noncooperation with the British masters—satyagraha at its most intense. Satyagraha meant no cooperation with evil, Gandhi said, which British rule had become. He outlined an entire campaign of attack, in successive waves, like an army advancing on an enemy stronghold.

First Indians would resign their honorary British titles and positions—knighthoods, society memberships, and the like. At the same time, no one would stand as a candidate in the new legislative elections slated for next year, while students and teachers would stage a mass walkout from schools, colleges, and universities across India.

Then would come a boycott of British courts. Indian lawyers and judges would resign from the High Court in Delhi and other jurisdictions (Motilal Nehru, a leading barrister, had already done so), and government officials would leave their posts. The third wave would be a refusal to buy anything but Indian-made goods. (Some wanted more direct action, so Gandhi added a public boycott of British goods to his
swadeshi
program.)
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Finally, once the first three waves had gained momentum, Indians were to withdraw from serving in the police and army, and they would pledge never to pay taxes to the Raj again.

It was precisely the program Gandhi had laid out in
Hind Swaraj,
broken down into four stages. The goal was the total shutdown of the Raj. The result would be the spiritual liberation of India, from top to bottom. Gandhi now asked the special session to endorse it. The delegates, even the most zealous, stirred nervously. Then Gandhi delivered his punch line. If Indians followed his program, he said, then they would have Swaraj within a year.

Many laughed in disbelief—but others did not. The debate was intense and passionate. Annie Besant was howled down when she tried to speak against the resolution; at one point Shaukat Ali tried to take a punch at Besant’s ally Muhammad Jinnah and had to be restrained.
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But eventually even the scoffers had to shrug and go along. What alternative was there? Old Guard skeptics like Besant had nothing better to propose.

The vote on September 7 was close. One hundred and forty-four voted to support Gandhi’s satyagraha; 132 voted against. It was a majority of only twelve. But now Gandhi had the momentum to carry his resolution to the main Congress session in Nagpur. In December more than fourteen thousand delegates showed up in the central Indian town—the largest turnout ever for a Congress meeting (both the Muslim League and Khilafat conference were meeting in Nagpur at the same time). Noncooperation supporters were in charge from the very start; fully 72 percent, or nearly three-quarters, of the delegates were Muslims.
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Voting by province, the Congress approved the Noncooperation resolution unanimously. The Sind and the United Provinces recorded a single dissenting voice each.

A new era had dawned for the Congress and for the political leadership of India. The group’s new constitution, which Gandhi helped to prepare, confirmed the change. It broadened the Congress’s base while sharpening its leadership at the top. An executive “working” committee of fifteen members took over running Congress, all fifteen being Gandhi’s men. At the same time proportional representation of India’s different linguistic areas expanded the number of delegates from obscure provinces, swamping the old Westernized elite who had opposed him. Gandhi completed the Old Guard’s rout by insisting that local vernaculars replace English as the language of debate in Congress meetings.

Some old-timers found Gandhi’s changes too radical to bear and quit the Congress. Even some supporters balked at what they considered Gandhi’s “autocratic” methods. Gandhi didn’t care. In the new Congress he had created a truly national movement. In 1918 its district chapters covered barely half of British India; by 1921 it had 212 chapters in every corner of the subcontinent. And every chapter was ready to be mobilized at his behest.
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