Gandhi & Churchill (56 page)

By August 1928 he felt ready for the task. His disciple Vallabhbhai Patel had just completed a highly successful satyagraha campaign in the Bardoli province of Gujarat against a land tax increase. (This was one area where peasants paid the tax directly to the government.) Gandhi did not personally go to Bardoli, but this was his home turf and Patel’s organizers constantly invoked his name. For six months the peasants endured arrest, seizure of property, and government intimidation. They remained united across religious and caste lines; when government agents seized land and cattle and put them up for sale, they found no buyers. Bardoli officials finally gave way, and those in other districts canceled planned tax increases. The peasants had won without violence and also drawn national publicity. Gandhi was thrilled. “Bardoli has shown the way and cleared it,” he wrote. “Swaraj lies on that route.”
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Bardoli restored his faith in the possibilities of satyagraha and signaled that it was time for him to return to politics.

That month he helped Motilal Nehru and other Moderate Congress officials draft their own plan for self-government in defiance of the Simon Commission. The so-called Nehru plan proposed direct “responsible government” for India, with elected legislatures in New Delhi and in the provinces and a federative constitution to incorporate the princely states. The goal was democratic Indian self-rule, under Dominion status. Muslims would have a guaranteed majority in places where they were a majority, like the Punjab and Sind. Otherwise the Nehru plan was a formula for Hindu majority rule. The Nehru plan offered India less independence from Britain than Gandhi had wanted in 1920, but he felt the time had come to endorse it.
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In February Simon and his fellow commissioners arrived in India. They were greeted by a massive national boycott, with demonstrations, shop closings, black flags, and shouts of “Simon Go Back.” When they visited again in October, full-scale riots erupted. Policemen waded in with truncheons and lathis, the metal-tipped canes used to control violent crowds. In Lahore, veteran Punjabi leader Lajpat Rai (no admirer of Gandhi) was beaten and died. The policeman responsible was then shot dead by a young revolutionary.
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In Lucknow police lathis sent Jawaharlal Nehru to the hospital.

As 1928 ended, the mood in India was ugly, but the mood in London was even uglier. Despite the riots Simon got to meet many Indian leaders, including Motilal Nehru, the Muslim League’s Muhammad Jinnah, National Liberal Federation leader T. B. Sapru, and even Lajpat Rai before his death. Simon and his colleagues were deeply unimpressed by what they heard. “I cannot imagine any more terrible fate in the world,” Lord Birkenhead wrote after hearing their complaints, “than to try to hack out a new constitution with such talkative and incompetent colleagues.”
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The situation had reached an impasse. Indians of every political stripe believed that the first step toward self-government for India had to be a public grant of independence. Then the Indians could hammer out a constitution with British help, working as equal partners. London, by contrast, believed that self-government was a matter not for Indians but for Parliament to decide.
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Once everyone agreed on a constitution (including India’s Muslims, who had dismissed the Nehru plan out of hand), steps toward a transfer of power could follow. In short, Indians wanted independence, then a constitution. The British wanted to see a constitution before they granted independence.

Otherwise, Britons asked not unreasonably, to whom could they
give
independence? Not the legislative councils set up in 1919: as creations of the Raj, they were utterly incapable of independent action. Not the Indian National Congress: it was riven by competing interests and factions, as was the Muslim League. In fact, by now every religion and region in India, every class and caste—even the untouchables—had “spokesmen” who were clamoring for attention and demanding to be part of any final deal. Even if the Simon Commission had wanted to include Indian members, the groups left out would have attacked them as unrepresentative.
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The problem of identity in India was proving to be a political Gordian knot, too tangled even for Gandhi to unravel. In December the INC assembled once more in Calcutta. The meeting was barely contained chaos. Opposition to the Moderates’ last stand, the Nehru plan, was led by Nehru’s own son together with a young Bengali radical named Subhas Chandra Bose, who joined forces to demand nothing less than instant and total independence from Britain. Tens of thousands of mill workers occupied the assembly site for two hours and passed a resolution supporting the radicals.
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For a few days it seemed that the Calcutta Congress might split down the middle.

Gandhi’s arrival saved the day. He entered the plenary session to wild applause and to Motilal Nehru’s relief. With Gandhi’s backing, the Moderates told themselves, their paper plan to convince Britain to grant Dominion status might still succeed. But Gandhi was not in a conciliatory mood. Privately, he was appalled at the Congress’s shabby financial state (individuals and entire provinces were deeply in debt) and its decay at the local level.
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“I shall only lead India when the nation comes to me to be led,” he had told supporters in November. And he would answer that call only when the nation agreed to play by his rules.

Gandhi made that clear from the beginning of the Calcutta Congress. He hammered out a compromise resolution with the younger Nehru and Bose. If the British refused to grant Dominion status within one year, it stated, then Indians would unite in a massive noncooperative campaign that would not quit until full independence was achieved. The resolution passed the Subjects Committee 118 to 45 (a sign that not everyone was on the Mahatma’s bandwagon), and it passed the open Congress with deafening cheers.

Then Gandhi insisted the delegates approve the other planks of his program: banning untouchability; supporting khadi and a boycott of all foreign cloth; even abstention from alcohol and the inclusion of women in new social roles. These planks too passed. Whether anyone thought they would be carried out was a different matter.
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Gandhi had infuriated young radicals like Bose with his brusque “take it or leave it” approach, but he felt he had no time to waste. He was nearly sixty. Many in his inner circle worried that his health could not stand another major political campaign, with its endless rounds of speeches, demonstrations, and travel, not to mention the occasional fast. But “no apology is necessary for taking me to Calcutta,” he told Motilal Nehru a few days later. “I was quite happy over it…[Now] we have to do battle both within and without.”
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“The battle within” meant spreading the message of Swaraj and its spiritual principles across India and deep into the ranks of Congress. “The battle without” meant gaining independence from the British.

Gandhi probably hoped to avoid a final confrontation with the government and that London would see the light before the December 1929 deadline. According to historian Judith Brown, for nearly a year Gandhi and the Congress awaited a response but made no plans for what to do if the British said no.
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After the chaos of the Calcutta Congress, Gandhi wondered whether Indians were ready for a satyagraha showdown with the Raj. “I know well enough how to lead to civil disobedience a people who are prepared to embark upon it on my terms,” he wrote in August, as the deadline approached. “I see no such sign on the horizon.” However, he added, “I am still hoping [that] a way out of the ‘encircling gloom’ will be found.”
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Then a light did break through the gloom, emanating not from London but from New Delhi. The man who lit it would become a crucial figure not only in Gandhi’s life but Churchill’s as well. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that for the next dozen years he would hold the fate of both men in his thin, spindly hands.

His name was Edward Wood, Lord Irwin, later Viscount Halifax. He was everything Churchill was not. Tall, lean, austerely angular, and deceptively soft-spoken, he was deeply religious to the point of sanctimoniousness. He was an easy man to respect but hard to admire. Halifax’s name is forever associated with the Neville Chamberlain policy of appeasement, of which he was the main architect. But in 1940 millions of Britons hoped he would become prime minister instead of Winston Churchill. He came within a hairbreadth of succeeding. In 1929 he was viceroy of India, and more than any other man he became Gandhi’s partner in shaping the destiny of India—and foiling the plans of Churchill and his hard-line allies.

Irwin was an unexpected choice for viceroy. When Stanley Baldwin approached him about the post in October 1925, the forty-four-year-old son of the Marquis of Halifax was almost unknown in British politics.
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Lord Birkenhead, who with his thirst for power had coveted the post, declared that the choice proved that in public life it paid “to be blameless rather than brilliant.”
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Neither Birkenhead nor anyone else could have guessed what a momentous appointment it really was.

Irwin arrived in India in March 1926 to take up a position that had lost some of its pomp since Lord Curzon’s day but was still one of the most powerful on earth. Under the new 1919 rules, viceroys were supposed to weigh all decisions with their Imperial Legislative Council and consult with the legislative councils in the provinces. On any truly important matter he was also bound to check with his colleagues, the governors-general of Bombay and Madras.

But in 1926 his word was still largely law. The viceroy of India was the single most powerful man in the British Empire, far more powerful than the prime minister. In Iran, China, and the Arabian peninsula, the influence of New Delhi counted as much as that of Whitehall.
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Irwin traveled across India in his own private train. He needed two full-time private secretaries and six aides-de-camp to keep track of his empire’s paperwork.

His official residence was the most lavish building in India, the still-unfinished Viceroy House. It was the visible monument to two centuries of British rule. Construction had begun two years after Curzon’s great 1903 durbar and was still going on in 1931. Bigger than Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, it occupied four and a half acres and had 340 rooms. Viceroy House was topped by an enormous gleaming Taj Mahal-esque dome designed by Britain’s most distinguished architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, while its exterior was made from the same red and buff sandstone that the Mughal emperors had used to build their palaces centuries before. As for the interior, hallways and rooms gleamed with multicolor marble inlays from every part of India: white from Jodhpur, green from Baroda, black from Gaya, pink from Alwar, and yellow from Jaisalmer.
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Running Viceroy House required a staff of six thousand plus four hundred gardeners, including fifty whose only job was chasing away the birds.
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Lady Irwin later estimated that in the cold-weather months they never sat down to a meal requiring fewer than forty-two servants. Many dinner parties required more than 120. Every meal became a ritual ceremony, as the viceroy presided over multiple tables of distinguished civil servants, generals, foreign diplomats and visitors, native princes and maharajas. When he appeared at a formal evening function, the English ladies were expected to curtsy at least seven times, as an official measure of respect.
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Viceroy House was also the hub of a vast bureaucratic wheel whose spokes extended into every corner of the subcontinent. Walking down King’s Way, a visitor would pass the other official buildings of the British government in India, the myriad ministries from forestry and the post office to the railways and the Imperial Mint. It was a government built on the assumption that it would do everything that Indians could not do for themselves. On the walls of the viceroy’s Secretariat was a bronze plaque that read:

LIBERTY DOES NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE.

A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY.

IT IS A BLESSING THAT MUST BE EARNED

BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.

Irwin no longer believed that was true. In 1926 he had been sent out essentially as a peacemaker, a “soft-liner,” to succeed hard-liners like his predecessor Lord Reading and Churchill’s friend George Lloyd. Irwin considered himself an idealist, but an idealist without illusions. One of the illusions he rejected was the idea that the Raj could remain in India. He belonged to a high-minded but disillusioned postwar generation who were convinced that national self-determination could not be stopped, either in Europe or elsewhere. “The Congress,” Irwin argued, “was a force that had the tide of history behind it.”
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Indians wanted self-government, and the British had no right to deny it to them. Irwin saw his task as viceroy helping the inevitable transfer of power and “to keep our tempers” as well as the peace.
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