Gandhi & Churchill (49 page)

The Cairo Conference also resolved the issue of the Khilafat and the Muslim holy places, if only indirectly. Churchill cleared the way for a secular modern Turkish state to emerge under Kemal Atatürk, the same Turkish general who had thwarted Churchill’s last gamble at Gallipoli.

On the religious front, the conference wrapped up the issues with dizzying speed. Atatürk, who had deposed the last sultan, also formally renounced the caliphate, while Prince Faisal’s father Hussein, as sharif of Mecca and king of Hejaz, took the title himself in 1924. In less than a year he would in turn be driven from power by his rival, Sheikh Ibn Saud. Ibn Saud and his successors never bothered to formally assume the title of caliph. And like Hussein’s sons, they would become reliable British and then American clients in the region.
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As the guardians of Mecca and Medina, however, the Saudi clan would spread a reactionary version of pan-Islamism, Wahhabism, to the millions of Muslim pilgrims who visited the shrines every year. Without realizing it, Churchill had tipped the ideological scales in favor of an emerging anti-Western Muslim radicalism—one that haunts the Arab-speaking world, the Middle East, and South Asia to this day. Meanwhile, the relatively tame pan-Islamic message of Muslim India’s leaders would fade into the background, even as its impact on India itself would spread and deepen.

Winston Churchill, far from fearing for the future, was profoundly pleased with himself. When he left Cairo at the end of March 1921, he had completed the last great expansion of British imperial power, far greater than anything his father had done. The Raj now served as the eastern flank of a British-dominated Middle East. Its soldiers would be ready to help secure the vital oil fields of Persia and Basra, while serving as garrison troops in Egypt, Palestine, Aden, Singapore, Burma, and (until 1928) Iraq.
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Thanks to Churchill, India’s submission to British rule was now more vital than ever.

For that reason, “it amazes me that Gandhi should be allowed to go undermining our position month after month, and year after year,” he wrote to Secretary of State Montagu in October 1921, just as Gandhi’s satyagraha was in full swing. “I am sure if he were arrested and deported from India,” Churchill went on, “you would meet an immediate reward in Parliamentary support and confidence.”
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In one exasperated moment, he even told Montagu that Gandhi “ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant”—the traditional punishment Mughal emperors meted out to traitors.
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Montagu declined to take up Churchill’s suggestion, but events were about to force his hand. Almost one year later, in 1922, Winston wrote to his old flame, Pamela Plowden, now the Countess of Lytton and wife of the governor of Bengal. He wanted to remind her and her husband to “keep the flag flying” over India and to make sure “the prestige and authority of the white man” remained undiminished. “Our true duty in India,” he wrote solemnly, “lies to those 300 millions whose lives and means of existence would be squandered if entrusted to the chatterboxes who are supposed to speak for India today.”
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The biggest of those “chatterboxes” was Gandhi. Churchill, however, could speak with some confidence. As he wrote those words, Gandhi was in prison serving a six-year sentence for sedition, and his noncooperation movement, on which he and his followers had pinned so much hope twelve months before, was in a shambles.

Most people, including (or especially) historians, tend to read Gandhi and Churchill’s lives backward. They assume too easily that both men enjoyed the same public adoration and respect when they were emerging onto their respective national scenes as they did when they left them. In both cases the truth is very different. In fact, the parallels between Gandhi’s assumption of leadership in 1920 and Churchill’s in 1940 are striking and instructive.

Both men were accepted as their nation’s “man of the hour.” Both had political visions that promised victory when others offered only despair. But both were also resented and feared by the establishments of their respective parties. Colleagues and rivals alike branded both as mavericks, headstrong and incorrigibly “impractical.” In the end, the Congress went along with Gandhi in 1920, and the Conservatives with Churchill twenty years later, because they had no alternative. But their resentment remained. They would stay on board only so long as their new captain made headway. When he did not, they were all too ready to jump ship.

At Nagpur, Gandhi had forced the Congress leadership into endorsing his campaign of noncooperation as well as its new constitution. But leading Congress politicians worried about the radical changes he had foisted on them and were terrified about what might happen next. Gandhi was undeterred. “The lawyers today lead public opinion and conduct all political activity,” he wrote sarcastically. “This they do during the few leisure hours they get for their tennis and billiards.” Dividing one’s time between politics and billiards, he argued, was not going to bring independence.
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But mobilizing the masses would. He devoted himself to doing so for the next fourteen months, in a carefully planned campaign that he took to all corners of India.

His schedule carried him everywhere, from Assam in the east to Tamil Nadu in the south. He traveled by the trains he hated, always in third class, although sometimes by car. He often gave several speeches a day to the crowds that flocked to every stop. Peasants lined the tracks for days before his arrival, hoping for a glimpse of the Mahatmaji. “Even in the depth of the night, we could hear cries of
‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’
in every station where the train had to stop,” an eyewitness remembered, as people gathered with torches to see, or even touch the feet of, the man who promised he would deliver them from the “satanic” government of the Raj.
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Admirers, and even Gandhi himself, liked to look back on the great Noncooperation campaign of 1921 as a personal triumph. One biographer even enthused that Gandhi revealed himself to be the “greatest general since Napoleon, but with a non-violent army.”
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In fact, the movement sputtered and stalled almost from the start.

Its opponents included India’s most articulate and respected voices. The
Bengalee
newspaper warned that “the older provinces which have been the longest in public life,” like Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, “are all against non-cooperation.” Annie Besant denounced Gandhi’s program as dangerously revolutionary; others condemned it as an invitation to chaos. Srinivasa Sastri called the idea of shutting down India “a fantastic notion” and of boycotting the Legislative Council elections “suicidal.” Rabindranath Tagore worried that Gandhi’s “fierce joy of annihilation” and of obliterating British rule would unloose forces that he and his followers could not control.
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Noncooperation may have mobilized India’s peasants and urban workers in politics for the first time, but those at the top and middle of society soon lost interest, especially when Gandhi’s grandiose pronouncement that Swaraj would come within a year proved wildly off the mark.

Many expressed their reservations in subtler ways, even as they paid lip service to the campaign. The call to resign titles and honors drew more than one hundred volunteers by March 1921, but few liked to point out this was out of a total of 5,186 title-holders. One Delhi barrister gave up his Royal Society membership during a public meeting after the crowd turned on him, but in private, he continued to use the “R.S.” initials after his name.
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Most Indian lawyers who quit the royal courts were back in a few months, except true believers like Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das.

At first, schools and universities emptied in response to Gandhi’s call. Those in Calcutta had to shut their doors completely. But like the lawyers, the students were soon back in class after a couple of months’ unauthorized “vacation.” In Bombay, things were back to normal by May.
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The desire for a Western education, with its promise of honor, office, and material reward, turned out to be greater than loyalty to Gandhi. The same was true in police departments across India (although some Muslims did quit after the Ali brothers were arrested in October) and the armed forces.

Merchants too tended to steer clear of the British goods boycott if it cut into their bottom line, although some imported cloth ended up in spectacular bonfires, including one in Bombay created by Gandhi himself. British exports fell as a result, but not enough to pressure the government. By the end of 1921 Gandhi shifted the focus from boycott to Swadeshi and the production of homespun cloth, in part because he knew the boycott was not working. He made khadi the national uniform for Congress politicians. But such tactics were hardly the way to drive the British out, or to drive capitalist profits away.

Gandhi was wearing his own khadi dhoti and cap when he had an audience with the new viceroy, Lord Reading, in May. “There is nothing striking about his appearance” was how Reading described Gandhi. “I should have passed him by in the street without a second look at him.” But “he is direct and expresses himself well in excellent English with a fine appreciation of the value of the words he uses.” Lord Reading became convinced that Gandhi’s religious views were genuine, “bordering on a fanaticism,” and that Gandhi sincerely thought “non-violence and love will give India its independence.” But Reading was shrewd enough to realize that in order to get Congress’s cooperation, Gandhi had “to accept many with whom he is not in accord, and has to do his best to keep the combination together.”
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Indeed, Gandhi’s national appeal had galvanized people never before involved in Indian politics, largely because no one else had ever asked them. Noncooperation demanded far more volunteers than any of Gandhi’s previous campaigns; mill workers, peasants, street hawkers, and small shop owners enthusiastically joined up in towns and villages across India. There were at least eighty thousand volunteers in the United Provinces alone.

As time went on and middle-class Indians began dropping out, the volunteers became “distinctly of a lower class than at first,” noted a British official in November. They are also “backed by the riffraff of the town.”
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They were happy to be paid a daily wage for putting up placards, picketing businesses and liquor stores (Noncooperation breathed a whole new life into Gandhi’s temperance movement), and harassing cab drivers or street vendors who violated the official hartal days. They adored Gandhi, whom they saw as their savior, but they had no stake in the old political order. As Tagore had predicted, Noncooperation conjured into existence a grassroots political force that its leader could not control, especially among his new Muslim allies.

They were the wild card in the political deck. Thousands of Muslims enthusiastically responded to the Khilafat satyagraha and worked side by side with Gandhi’s volunteers, but the Ali brothers were determined to push things in their own pan-Islamic direction. They issued a call for Muslim soldiers and police to quit their jobs—alarming Hindus who worried about chaos if the huge crowds swarming in every city were allowed to run out of control. Some radical Muslim leaders were even muttering about declaring a jihad. This did not happen. But July 1921 saw a national Khilafat conference in Karachi, which at the urging of the Ali brothers approved a resolution that called serving in the Indian Army a sin against the Islamic faith.

Now the government had to act. No one was interested in trying to stop or arrest Gandhi (as Churchill angrily noted), although thousands of his followers were already in jail. New Delhi had learned from the South African experience that Gandhi in prison caused more trouble than Gandhi out of prison. But an open call for soldiers to desert the Indian Army was tantamount to sedition. In October the Ali brothers were arrested and interned.

The anger that had been simmering all summer, and since Amritsar, broke through the flimsy constraints of Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha. From August to November violence broke out everywhere, from arson in government schools in Orissa, to riots outside courtrooms in Calcutta where Khilafat workers were on trial, to a bloody rural insurrection in Moplal in Malabar, where Muslim peasants murdered their Hindu landlords. British and Indian troops had to be sent in, and some six hundred Hindus were said to have been butchered.
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Gandhi was outraged. How, he asked aloud, could he possibly hope for a successful Noncooperation movement if “the masses behave like mobs”?
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In September he was passing with Rajaji through Madras, where an unruly crowd shouted so much he could not make himself heard. He suddenly decided that he would from now on wear nothing,
absolutely nothing,
except a simple loincloth, like a poor peasant in the field, as an act of penance for his followers’ behavior and as an example to others. Rajaji was horrified, but Gandhi was adamant.
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What started as a temporary gesture became a permanent badge of honor. His semi-nakedness symbolized Gandhi’s solidarity with the lowest of the low, and became part of the essential Gandhi image. However, like his fast after Amritsar, it was his way of protesting not the brutish behavior of the British but of his fellow Indians.

Still, Gandhi was not ready to abandon his Muslim allies, even though some openly embraced violence and the more hard-line ones were already objecting to having infidel Hindus as allies.
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Gandhi declared that if he had been in Karachi, he would have signed the same resolution—implying he should be in jail as well. In November he proposed for the next Congress session a resolution that for Indians to serve in the Indian Army or the police was “contrary to national dignity.” Gandhi convinced several Congress leaders to sign on as well, and it was published on November 5, 1921.
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