Gandhi & Churchill (58 page)

Winston would have none of it. “It may be legitimate to encourage a sick patient with hope,” he replied, “but that is very different from deluding a vain people with false promises.”
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Lytton never asked which vain people Winston was talking about. Was it the Indians, or perhaps the British themselves? Over the next six years, as the debate over India raged, Churchill never made up his mind. He never could decide who was more self-deluded: the Indians who imagined they could rule themselves without help, or the British public and a Conservative Party who believed they could give up India without dire consequences.

This bleak realization, that Britons might actually hand over their hard-won heritage without a fight, did not come to him immediately. Yet even as he joined in Lord Lytton’s party that weekend in Hertfordshire and pontificated at the breakfast table on the need to block Dominion status for India, the seeds of another plan, a larger and bolder one, was taking shape in his mind.

Churchill wanted a showdown on India. Everyone else, it seemed, wanted the opposite. Everyone, that is, except Gandhi.

Gandhi had been strangely silent in the days after Irwin’s historic pronouncement on October 29. Historians and biographers all speculate about his state of mind; his own words are of little help. Certainly he felt enormous pressures to go along with Moderates like M. A. Ansari and Gandhi’s old friend Motilal Nehru. They sensed a breakthrough was imminent; Irwin seemed to have offered the last best hope for a deal on independence before the radicals won over the “Indian street.” If it cooperated, the Indian National Congress could win significant concessions in the first of the so-called Round Table Conferences, scheduled for next year.

Gandhi saw their point, and when he and they met in Delhi in the first two days of November, he worked hard to arrange a compromise statement that he, they, and radicals like Jawaharlal Nehru and S. C. Bose could all sign. The result was the Delhi Declaration of November 2. It was hardly a victory for Lord Irwin or his Indian supporters. It demanded that all political prisoners be released; that full Dominion status be granted
before
the Round Table Conferences; that the Indian National Congress be the main representative of Indian opinion at the conferences; and that all discussions center on framing a suitable “Dominion Constitution for India.”
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The Moderates thought this statement too truculent but signed on anyway. Bose and the younger Nehru considered it too mild, and Gandhi had to use all his influence to get them to put their names to it. Both resigned from the Congress Working Committee immediately afterward, showing how much they disliked the declaration and disliked being arm-twisted by Gandhi.
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The usual Gandhi image is that of a man prepared to walk alone rather than compromise his principles. In fact, the Delhi Declaration reveals him at his negotiating best. Members of his Bania caste had a reputation as keen bargainers. Most Indian observers, and the savvy British ones, attributed Gandhi’s skill to his Bania background as well as his breeding in Kathiawar, long considered the home of hard-headed merchants and sharp businessmen.
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It was a crucial aspect of Gandhi’s personality that sentimental admirers like Romain Rolland, as well as modern filmmakers, miss. Gandhi possessed a clear principled mind, a lawyer’s skill in verbal distinctions, a sharp empathy for understanding his opponents’ position, infinite patience, and an iron will—all the ingredients of a master negotiator.

From that perspective, the November 1929 declaration may be his masterpiece. Certainly Gandhi had managed to pull Indian leaders together on a divisive issue, if only temporarily. Yet it is not at all clear that he thought it mattered. He did not read Churchill’s article in the
Daily Mail,
but it would only have fed his growing suspicion that the Labour Party was not strong enough to get Dominion status for India through Parliament. Opposition there would render Irwin’s promises, however well meant, worthless: “a piece of waste paper to be thrown into the basket designed for such papers.” In the end, Indians would have to take their independence for themselves, just as Gandhi had always intended. “The winning of Swaraj,” he reiterated in
Navajivan
on November 10, “depends only on our own strength.”
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That week Lord Irwin heard from an American visitor to Sabarmati named Sherwood Eddy. It was Eddy’s impression that Gandhi would hold out against any further compromise on independence. The Delhi Declaration was his final word on the subject, Eddy told Irwin. If its demands were not met by December 31, Gandhi was ready to start the next wave of civil disobedience, whether his Moderate and Liberal friends were ready or not.
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They suspected the same thing. At first, Srinivasa Sastri wrote, “I thought he was genuinely struggling on our side. Now, however, a doubt has begun to cross my mind. Is he not after all thirsting for a great opportunity for his mighty weapon?”—namely, mass
ahimsa
.
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The truth was, Gandhi was eager to test his new approach to satyagraha as a national mass movement. The Bardoli experience had bolstered his confidence that its bugs had been worked out; that skilled and motivated local leaders could mobilize local support without violence; and that the discipline of his satyagrahis could extend down to ordinary people by example. Why put off until tomorrow what would work today? Why allow false hopes of compromise to postpone final victory? Gandhi figured the perfect place to stage his next move would be the next Congress, which would be in Lahore over Christmas Week—just as the Calcutta deadline expired.

Viceroy Irwin had thought his declaration would rally moderate men of all shades of opinion. In fact, it was encouraging men to become more extreme: first Churchill, now Gandhi. On the eve of Lahore, in a last ditch effort to forestall disaster, Irwin arranged a meeting with Gandhi and other leaders. The news from Britain was equally discouraging. His friend George Lane-Fox confessed that “Baldwin has gotten himself into rather a tiresome hole” with his support for Irwin and that Churchill’s militancy promised an ugly fight in the Commons.
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And others were equally eager to get into the picture.

In the predawn hours of December 22, 1929, Lord Irwin boarded his special viceregal train in Hyderabad. He was headed for New Delhi to take up official residence at the new Viceroy House. That very afternoon he would meet Gandhi and the other politicians to discuss his declaration about Dominion status.

The gleaming white train glided through the darkness. As the sun rose, the train approached the station at Delhi, breaking through the thick damp fog that had settled across the railway tracks. It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning. Irwin was comfortably settled in his plush seat and reading the sermons of Richard Challoner, a seventeenth-century bishop who was one of Irwin’s favorite authors.

The train slowed to thirty-five miles per hour in order to chug up along a high curved embankment, near the Old Fort or Purana Qila, at the outskirts of Delhi. As he turned the page, Irwin suddenly heard a loud bang.

He set down his book and listened. “That must be a bomb,” he told himself. Amid a cacophony of squealing brakes, the acrid smell of cordite wafted down the car corridor. The train ground to a halt. Men and soldiers jumped down onto the track, guns drawn.

They soon found a large hole in the tracks where a dynamite charge had gone off. Terrorists had set the fuse inside the nearby Old Fort, which loomed over the rail line. It had been timed to explode when the engine reached the curve. The plan had been to derail the viceroy’s train and send it tumbling down the thirty-foot embankment, crushing him and everyone else on board.

However, the fuse had been badly laid. The engine and the first three cars had already passed before it detonated, and the rest of the train was able to pass over the gap unharmed.

Irwin had calmly returned to reading his Challoner when one of his assistants dropped in to suggest he take a look. He eased his long, slim form down the carriage steps and ambled along the track, as the train’s engine hissed and huffed in the background. There he found the stricken car. The blast had yanked the carriage floor upward into an arch of twisted steel, with splintered planking sticking out in all directions. Several yards of the steel tracks had been blown apart. Miraculously the only casualty was an Indian servant who had been slightly injured by the blast. Everyone else on the train was safe. Hindu terrorists had tried to turn the Raj upside down by murdering its viceroy, and failed.
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Irwin ruefully surveyed the damage. “It is really astonishing,” he wrote to his father later, “that there should be people who think these kinds of things can sincerely benefit them.”
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But part of him was almost pleased by the assassination attempt. He had nearly become a martyr for moderation. Gandhi had always said that nothing unites people like suffering. Halifax had not exactly suffered in the attack, but surely, he thought, this incident must convince Gandhi and his allies that he was sincere and that it was time to reach an agreement.

With characteristic British fortitude, Irwin arrived at his meeting at Viceroy House on time. Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Liberals T. B. Sapru and V. B. Patel,
^*84
along with the Muslim leader Muhammad Jinnah, were all waiting for him. Gandhi congratulated Irwin on his miraculous escape, but thereafter he was, Irwin wrote later, “at his intolerable worst.” Irwin’s near-martyrdom had not helped him at all.

On the contrary, Gandhi and the others told him there could be no further compromise. If the British government was unprepared to meet the demands of the Delhi Declaration, they would have no choice but to carry out their plan of mass civil disobedience. Gandhi added that he could not attend the Round Table Conference in London as long as the British government refused to let the Indians speak “with a single voice” through the Congress. It was not members of Parliament, but Indians, who should frame India’s future. Motilal Nehru agreed. The goal of any conference should be “the transfer of power” from Great Britain to India—and the Indian National Congress.

Finally, Irwin asked point-blank if Gandhi believed the British were being insincere about wanting to give Indians self-government. Gandhi replied he still believed in the sincerity of individuals like Irwin but not in the government as a whole. Jinnah and Sapru tried to be more conciliatory, but it was Gandhi’s meeting. After two and a half hours, he and the others left. Irwin’s generous gesture, his declaration on Dominion status, had been brusquely brushed aside.
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“They really were impossible,” Irwin angrily told his secretary of state, Wedgwood Benn, “and left me more than usually depressed about the lack of political sense that extremist politicians naturally betray.” But, he shrewdly guessed that Gandhi’s truculence arose in part from his fear that a truly open Round Table Conference would only expose Indian rivalries and divisions, which the British could exploit: “It seemed better to their minds to invent a reason not to participate in it.” However, if Gandhi and his supporters resorted to noncooperation again, he warned, “we shall lose no time in jumping on their heads”—even though, Irwin added piously, “I am a pacifist by nature.”
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A week before the New Year the preliminaries for the Lahore Congress got under way. It was the most divisive Congress of Gandhi’s career. The Moderates begged him to be more reasonable and to give room for Lord Irwin to negotiate. Gandhi’s one concession was a vote congratulating the viceroy on escaping assassination. It barely passed. At the same time, however, S. C. Bose’s attempt to get support for forming an independent opposition government also went down to defeat.

This was Gandhi’s mood: a rebuff to the Moderates, then a rebuff to the radicals. The only agenda left was Gandhi or nothing. The resolution he proposed and rammed through was that unless the British government gave way on Dominion status by midnight on New Year’s Eve, the Congress would mobilize all means to achieve Purana Swaraj: complete independence. In the final session, the resolution passed overwhelmingly, with passionate cries of
“Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”

Gandhi had won. Master of the situation, he looked forward confidently to battle—even though a police spy noted that “every point in his program is bitterly distasteful to one important section or another.”
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At almost the same time Winston Churchill was writing his own letter to the viceroy. He had telegrammed Irwin earlier to congratulate him on escaping assassination. Irwin had written back on the twenty-sixth, thanking him and saying he understood Churchill’s position on Dominion status. Irwin wryly added, “I am not wholly insane” in believing he could still palliate Indian opinion. He truly believed that “half the problem is psychological and a case of hurt feelings” and that by reassuring Gandhi and other Indian leaders about British intentions, he could bring about a final settlement.

“I do think,” Irwin had written, that “once Edwin Montagu set our feet upon our present road” the British government was bound to see it to the end—“unless we are prepared indefinitely to pursue methods that I don’t think British would long tolerate,” namely full-scale violent repression.
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Churchill refused to be ruffled. “I do not think that we need fear any shock in India of violence,” he wrote that New Years’ Day. “Strength will be given to us in proportion to our need.” If Indians rejected reasonable reforms, the British should not hesitate to take back direct rule. “Once the evil elements” among Indian nationalists met resolute British will power, “our task will be rendered far less formidable and difficult.”