Gandhi & Churchill (61 page)

Chaudhuri himself collected the pictures of the arrests and beatings that ran day after day in every newspaper. He hoped to run an issue of
Monthly Review
devoted to the shocking pictures, but the government confiscated the copies. He told his wealthy lawyer brother that he wanted to do something more dramatic and be arrested; his brother only laughed and said Nirad was acting like a child.
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But Chaudhuri’s reaction was more typical of India’s educated elite; and skeptics like his brother were becoming scarcer. A successful political movement never requires more than a handful with a “mania for martyrdom” it only needs a silent majority to watch and sympathize. After fifteen years of trying, Gandhi had brought about a seismic shift in Indian politics.

There were, however, limits to that shift. The courts, provincial councils, and legislatures defied the boycott (although many members stayed away out of fear of mob retaliation). Unrest sometimes resulted when Gandhians tried to include untouchables in the protests. And the silence from the Islamic community was ominous: less than one in twenty of the imprisoned resisters was a Muslim.
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Still, Gandhi could be satisfied. In Yeravda he was given his old suite of two cells. He was allowed one of his portable spinning wheels, which he worked nearly six hours a day, and a goat for making his milk. He was even allowed a secretary, to keep up with his unceasing correspondence, and newspapers, including the
Times of India,
to follow the progress of events. He was content, even relaxed: “I have been quite happy and making up for arrears in sleep,” he told Mirabehn after a week—and he was totally unmoved by the government’s discomfiture.
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As far as he was concerned, he had said his last word on the subject. “This Indian Empire was conceived in immorality,” he wrote before his arrest. “There is no way open to the people save to end a system whose very foundations are immoral.”
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Every day the protests seemed to grow bolder and more effective. What better way to help with India’s self-purification than to ignore the pleas for compromise and see the campaign to its end?

Because as the dry season gave way to the monsoons, the only disturbance in Gandhi’s calm was the steady stream of distinguished visitors sent by Irwin to try to persuade Gandhi to talk to the government. T. B. Sapru, M. Jayakar, the ailing Motilal Nehru, and the newly released Jawaharlal, then Sapru and Jayakar again. All came away empty-handed. The warden of Yeravda understood Gandhi better than Lord Irwin did. “He sticks to his own opinions,” he noted, “and does not listen to the advice of others.”
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Sapru saw Gandhi in early September 1930. A lawyer and pillar of the National Liberal Federation, Sapru considered himself the true keeper of Gokhale’s Moderate flame. For years he had distrusted Gandhi’s motives and had been skeptical that noncooperation could achieve much. But as the Congress boycotters took over the cities, as legislators were forced to quit by their neighbors, and as even peasants in outlying districts refused to pay their taxes, “I have been compelled by personal experience to revise some of my opinions,” he confessed to the viceroy on September 19.

“The Congress has undoubtedly acquired a great hold on popular imaginations,” Sapru marveled, including large numbers of people who had never had any political opinions before. “The popular feeling is one of intense excitement, fed from day to day by continuous and persistent” Congress propaganda. However, Sapru worried that this bred not only an enthusiasm for Gandhi and the Congress but a contempt for government as a whole, including fanning “racial feeling.” Law-breaking in the name of civil disobedience was becoming a habit. Unless it stopped, the result would be the collapse not just of the Raj but of the India that Sapru and his elite colleagues hoped to rule in its stead.
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But there was nothing Irwin could do. The power to shape events in India had shifted to London. And there one man in particular was looking forward to succeeding where Irwin and everyone else had failed.

In January 1930 Harold Nicolson ran into Churchill at Stornoway House, the country estate of press baron Lord Beaverbrook. Winston looked “very changed from when I had last seen him,” Harold remarked. He seemed “incredibly aged” with “a great white face like a blister.” Nicholson noted that the former
enfant terrible
of British politics had declined into its elder statesman: “His spirits have also declined and he sighs that he has lost his old fighting power.”
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But as wave after wave of bad news from India hit the papers, Churchill found a new cause to revive his old drive and energy. Before the summer was out, he had become Britain’s major spokesman for a policy of no surrender on India. In just over a year he would use the issue to nearly topple the Tory leadership and put himself at his party’s head. The coming battle over India would be Churchill’s rehearsal for his fight for rearmament in the middle of the decade and against appeasement at its end. And just as the specter of Adolf Hitler haunted Churchill in 1940, the shadow of the Mahatma fell across everything he said or did about India for the next five years.

At first Churchill thought Gandhi’s arrest meant the government was finally cracking down on the nationalist movement. Then came the news of the negotiations at Yeravda. Winston flew into paroxysms of rage. He accused Irwin and the government of allowing “this malevolent fanatic” to hold “cabinet councils with fellow conspirators in jail,” while the government “waited cap in hand outside the cell door.” Everything the viceroy was doing was sending the wrong signal, that “the government was clearing out of India,” merely fighting a rearguard action, and so on. Turmoil and violence were bound to be the natural result.
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This attack in August 1930 rang alarm bells in Tory corridors. A member of the Simon Commission, George Lane-Fox, warned Lord Irwin that Churchill was deliberately alienating “Indian opinion” as well as “stampeding the Conservatives by the cry that the Socialists are giving away India.” Lane-Fox found Churchill’s words inflammatory and utterly reprehensible, “just the very sort of phrases which we did our best in our Report to avoid.”
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Lane-Fox, like T. B. Sapru, sensed that Gandhi and Churchill could between them upset a carefully balanced apple cart. Not for the last time “moderate men of all stripes of opinion” despaired of both of them.

The long-awaited Simon Commission report tried to set out the terms of balance in June and July. On the issue of Indian self-government, it recommended a policy of caution—or, to suspicious Indian eyes, deliberate delay. Nothing was said of Dominion status.
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Instead, Simon and his colleagues recommended allowing Indians to govern themselves at the provincial level: a major step. But they also argued that the British government should maintain full powers over the army and the police. Even after the provinces and princely states joined together in a future united government, it averred, a strong viceroy should remain in New Delhi with the power of veto.

This formula for a balance or division of powers between an Indian legislature and a British executive, known by the catchphrase “dyarchy,” was never meant as a final settlement for India. It was supposed to be just another landmark on the Long March to Independence (which more and more Indians were coming to believe was a journey without end). But as a political formula, it created more problems than it solved. Indians were no happier with it than were the Churchill conservatives, who saw the whole scheme as a giveaway. Viceroy Irwin, for that matter, called it a “conjuring trick” and a “fraud” and was furious that his concession on the principle of Dominion status had been ignored.
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But events had already passed dyarchy by. Shortly after Gandhi’s arrest Irwin announced his plan for a Round Table Conference or summit of British and Indian politicians, scheduled for the autumn. Irwin made plain that its agenda would be set by New Delhi, not by the Simon Commission—although Irwin untruthfully reassured the king that its report would be the principal basis of discussion.
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Simon was humiliated to learn that he was not even invited. The issue had suddenly become not
if
India was to get Dominion status, but
when
and
how
—even as Gandhi’s refusal to attend promised to doom the conference before it started.

Meanwhile the ugly flare-ups of violence in India reminded the British public of what was at stake. In Solapur in Maharashtra, just three days after Gandhi’s arrest, three Muslim constables were seized by a Hindu mob, tied together, and set ablaze after being soaked in gasoline. Irwin said this “uncomfortable episode” was a reminder what would happen “if ever we lose grip on the situation.”
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But that was exactly what Churchill and his allies feared was happening.

Not until late August were the violent disturbances in Peshawar stamped out. Churchill growled that in his day British troops would have been sent at once to crush the Pathan rebels who had attacked the city, or to hound them back into the hills. Instead, “the spirit of defeatism in high places” had hesitated to use force; the result was chaos. And now Irwin and his Socialist allies, Churchill warned, were about to use this so-called Round Table Conference to hand India over to a clique of “politically minded, highly educated Hindus” who would reduce India “to the deepest depths of Oriental tyranny and despotism.”
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The leader of Churchill’s own party, the party of empire, however, seemed unwilling to do anything to stop it. In October Stanley Baldwin announced there would be a Tory delegation at the conference. So Winston decided he himself had to take the lead in thwarting the defeatists and in saving India.

Chapter Eighteen

ROUND TABLES AND NAKED FAKIRS

1930–1931

The truth is Gandhi-ism, and everything it stands for, will have to be crushed.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1930

C
HURCHILL’S RESOURCES FOR THE COMING FIGHT
were meager but not insubstantial. His ally George Lloyd, who was now Lord Lloyd, was prepared to mobilize support in the House of Lords. Lloyd was a founder of the India Empire Society: made up largely of ex–Indian Army officers and Indian Civil Service men (including several MPs), it hoped to bring public pressure to bear on the issue of “no surrender” and on the stakes involved. In March Lloyd published a series of articles in the
Daily Telegraph
purporting to show how much British rule had improved the lives of ordinary Indians and how minorities like Muslims and untouchables relied on the British to protect them from a Hindu Brahmin elite.

Giving away India would not be progress, Lloyd argued, but a step backward, to the bad old days before the British brought law and order and civilization to the subcontinent. Such a step would be “the height of cowardice.” Lloyd’s plaintive cry was the same as Churchill’s: “What has become of our old genius to rule and our instinct to understand, better than all others, the needs of our Indian Empire?”
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One powerful ally whom Churchill had banked on, Lord Birkenhead, died on September 30. But he picked up two Liberal supporters: Sir John Simon, who was miffed at being excluded from the Round Table Conference; and Irwin’s immediate predecessor as viceroy, Lord Reading. What these Liberals lacked in numbers they made up in prestige. In addition, many other Liberals feared for India’s future without the Raj, including David Lloyd George. When a German envoy, Prince von Bismarck, arrived in October, he heard both Churchill and Lord Reading express “great anxieties over the forthcoming Indian Round Table Conference.” Both put the blame for the disorder in India on Irwin and what they called “his policy of appeasement”—marking the first time that word became part of Churchill’s political vocabulary.
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Winston also hoped to mobilize Britain’s most powerful press lords, Rothermere and Beaverbrook. Rothermere and the imperialist
Daily Mail
were already on board. Then on September 23, Winston approached Beaverbrook to “help our Island out of the rotten state into which it has now fallen.” The danger was that after the sacrifices of the Great War “we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance.”
³

Churchill affirmed that his sole interest now was to prevent such a development and that he needed Beaverbrook’s help in launching “a new and strong assertion of Britain’s right to live and right to reign with her Empire splendid and united.” Churchill and Beaverbrook had their sharp differences over issues of free trade and Imperial Preference, he pointed out, but now “we ought to be all helping each other” in what was for Winston the “supreme issue”: India.
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He also warned Stanley Baldwin, “The most serious of all our problems is India…I must confess myself to care more about this business than anything else in public life.”
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Meanwhile letters were pouring in from well-wishers. Lord Burnham, former proprietor of the
Daily Telegraph,
told him that surrendering India would be “a crime against civilization.” Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob sent an eyewitness account of how “we are galloping downhill” in Bombay and elsewhere in India. T. E. Lawrence assured him, “You will remain an indispensable part of the early twentieth century.” Even his old commanding officer in India, eighty-eight-year-old Sir Bindon Blood, wrote, “I am full of hope that the way to No 10 is clearing for you.”
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