Gandhi & Churchill (68 page)

In short, Gandhi’s arrest had changed nothing. India would be handed over to Indians, with or without him. The only question was whether it would be done with one or two parliamentary bills. (In the end, it was one.) From the other side of the Atlantic, Churchill had misread the mood. He and his hard-line troops would have to fight an uphill battle alone.

The first part of his campaign had been to arouse the media and public. To do so, Churchill increasingly concentrated his attacks on Gandhi, as the evil genius behind the handover. This was unfair and untrue. On the other hand, Gandhi made an irresistible and useful target. Many Tories and ordinary Britons had been shocked at Irwin’s direct dealings with Gandhi, a man “seditious in aim and in practice, and directly responsible for the loss of hundreds of lives.”
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They were equally shocked by the sight of Gandhi wandering at will in the streets of London in his strange costume (“Cover your Nudity!” was the angry note one retired British colonel passed to Gandhi) and even having tea with the king—“tea with treason,” as George Lloyd called it.
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Winston no longer limited himself to calling Gandhi the “seditious Middle Temple lawyer” and “half-naked…fakir.” The Mahatma had became a protean enemy, a multiform menace. In one speech Gandhi appeared as the cunning huckster, scheming to replace the Raj with his Brahmin cronies and exploiting the ignorance of India’s masses for his own selfish gain. In another Churchill accused Gandhi of using “Moscow methods,” portraying him as a kind of dhoti-clad commissar who after every concession simply made more demands.
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Yet Churchill could also paint Gandhi as the atavistic spokesman of a pagan Hinduism, with its “shrines and burning ghats, its priests and ascetics, its mysterious practices and multiform ritual…unchanged through the centuries, untouched by the West.”
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In still other forums, he played on Gandhi’s links to leading Indian industrialists, the “Bombay merchants and mill owners” who were “the power behind” Gandhi’s hartals and boycotts. “No class of capitalists in the world, in this present year of depression, has made such vast profits,” Churchill charged. These hard-faced men in turbans had built their fortunes on the backs of India’s poor and would profit even more from tariffs on British goods once “the swindle” of independence was achieved. “Superstition and greed,” he concluded, “are marching hand in hand to the spoliation of millions of people.”
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Finally, Churchill painted Gandhi as the aspiring dictator of India, a Hindu Mussolini who spouted nonviolence out of one side of his mouth and who spoke of hiring white Europeans (white janissaries as Churchill called them) to train a new Swaraj Indian army, out of the other. He even accused Gandhi of wanting to foment a race war, in which whites and Indians would either “exhaust or destroy the other.”

“This is the man,” Churchill scornfully concluded, “that you have by your policy made the one outstanding figure with whom you are now to negotiate the future.” But what future could India indeed have without the British? he asked. “India is a geographic term,” he told the Constitutional Club. “It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” Yet by pretending that it was, Britain would be delivering 300 million people to the tender mercies of an out-of-touch Hindu elite and their monstrous ringleader.
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Rousing the nation was one thing; actually blocking or delaying independence was another. Churchill’s parliamentary lieutenants were few but eager. They were determined to fight for India “to the last ditch,” as one of them, Alfred Knox, phrased it, and fervently believed Britain’s silent majority would rally to their cause. On May 25, 1932, Winston kicked off his campaign with a speech to the India Empire Society at the Carleton Club. He reminded his followers that back in 1930 he had said, “Sooner or later we shall have to crush Gandhi and the Congress, and all that they stand for.” He had been abused for saying so at the time, but now that Gandhi was in prison and order restored, everyone realized he had been right. All that was needed was the willpower to act, Churchill affirmed, and a willingness to face the fact that India would be helpless without the British.

“I can assure you that Parliament will stand no nonsense about India,” he said as his audience cheered. “When this Parliament acts, [the] Government will obey, and India will be saved.”
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Even as members were finishing their port and Winston lit his second cigar, the government’s plans for granting Dominion status to India ground on. Although he said nothing to anyone, this was Churchill’s greatest fear. He did not worry about Gandhi, or the industrialists, or the fiery ghats and Brahmin priests. Despite the rhetoric, he was not even concerned that the Indians might rise up in a second Mutiny and drive the British out.

His real anxiety was that the British themselves would simply give up, out of a combination of weakness, pacifism, fear, and misplaced conscience. Reading Gibbon on the veranda in Bangalore had taught him that such defeatism was “the slow and secret poison” that doomed the Roman Empire and sapped the Romans’ “sense of national honor” and “habit of command.” If it had happened to Rome, it could happen to Britain as well.

“What is the disease we are suffering from now in this island?” he had plaintively asked the crowd in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall back in February 1931. “It is a disease of the willpower.” Churchill found it incredible that “the British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days…can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory”—or that Britons could forget their duty to remain in India.
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Churchill knew if that happened, and Gandhi won, it would be the end of his Great Britain.

Forever.

Chapter Twenty

LAST DITCH

1932–1935

When a man fasts, it is not the gallons of water he drinks that sustains him, but God.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

I
F
C
HURCHILL FELT A GROWING DISENCHANTMENT
with events, so did Gandhi. Life in the Yeravda prison followed the usual pattern of praying, reading, and spinning. He had the company of a fellow satyagrahi prisoner, Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel liked to prepare Gandhi’s morning “cocktail” of honey and lemon water and peel his fruit for him. It amused him that Gandhi spent so much time brushing his teeth (sometimes two hours a day) when he had only two teeth left. Patel also offered advice for answering the myriad letters Gandhi received, many from complete strangers. One man asked what he could do about his unattractive wife. “Tell him to keep his eyes shut” was Patel’s response.
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Gandhi’s own mood was far from jovial or serene. With his satyagraha campaign crushed and his followers either in jail or sharply divided, events seemed to be spinning out of his control. He sent a regular stream of complaints to the warden and to the warden’s superiors in Bombay and New Delhi. Patel sensed that he did so “lest they think he is a spent force.” Yeravda was looking less like an inspiring beacon and more like a gilded cage. Gandhi realized he was losing his ability to influence Indian politics—exactly what the government had hoped would happen.

This reality came home to him in August 1932, when the MacDonald government announced its Communal Award, or plan for minority representation in India’s future constitution. Drawn up by Secretary of State Hoare in consultation with various Indian Liberals, the plan was dense and detailed and varied from province to province. Muslims proved the biggest winners: Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus, along with Bengal’s Hindus, were stunned to learn that Muslims would outnumber them in their own provincial legislatures. (Of 250 seats in Bengal, Muslims would get 111 and Hindus only 88, with another 25 reserved for the province’s Europeans.)
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But the most startling part of the plan was its creation of a separate electorate for India’s untouchables—they gained the right to contest seats even at the national level. It signaled a cultural as well as a political revolution for India. Gandhi for one was going to have no part of it.

Others shared his anger. What to the British was a matter of political gerrymandering to gratify political interests (and to groom potential allies for keeping India securely within the empire) was to Hindus a question of vital religious identity. Giving untouchables a separate status meant in effect splitting the Hindu nation across the bow. For better or worse, the existence of the dalit, the beggar, and other low castes served to remind other Hindus of the inexorable law of karma and their own benefit from its workings. Besides, granting the so-called Depressed Classes
political
rights opened the possibility that they might demand other rights in a new Dominion India as well, such as equal employment, education, and housing.

For Gandhi, the issue was particularly tricky. He considered untouchability an abomination, and its eradication was essential to his own dream of Swaraj. “I would far rather that Hinduism died,” he had said during the second Round Table Conference, “than that untouchability lived.” More than once he had said, “To remove untouchability is a penance that caste Hindus owe to Hinduism and to themselves.”
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But solving the problem was up to Hindus, he had told the conference, not constitutional lawyers. “Those who speak about political rights of the Untouchables, do not know India and do not know how Indian society is today constructed.” Accepting separate electorates would be a disaster for India, Gandhi felt. Moreover it would probably shatter the Congress’s alliance with the ultra-orthodox Hindu Mahasabha brotherhood, which had a history of supporting violent extremists like Savarkar but that was now headed by Gandhi’s friend Madan Mohan Malaviya.
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In March Gandhi had warned Sir Samuel Hoare that he would resist any concession of separate electorate with a “fast unto death,” claiming that the award would “vivisect and disrupt” Hinduism.
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The day after the award was announced, Gandhi began composing his own announcement: on September 20 he would begin a fast to convince the British authorities to change their minds. “It may be that my judgement is warped,” he wrote to MacDonald, “and that I am wholly in error in regarding separate electorates for Depressed Classes as harmful to them or to Hinduism.” In that case, he said simply, “my death by fasting will be at once a penance for my error.”
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It was a bizarre letter, even by Gandhi’s standards, and when he leaked it to the public in advance of the fast, the government was livid, as it allowed public alarm and pressure on the government to mount. Hoare, MacDonald, and even Viceroy Willingdon were at a loss about what to do. There was talk of trying to move Gandhi out of Yeravda, in case he fell ill or even died. But no one doubted for a moment Gandhi’s resolve, even those who did not understand why he was doing it. Young Nehru, in particular, was angry that Gandhi was wasting his energy, perhaps even killing himself, on what seemed a peripheral issue. Nehru was getting fed up with what he called Gandhi’s “religious and sentimental approach to a political question.” He sent the Mahatma a note explaining his “mental agony and confusion” at Gandhi’s decision but that he now waited with peace of mind.
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In private he worried that the beloved leader had lost his way.

But Gandhi had never changed paths. After forty years he remained true to his New Age quest. To his mind, political questions were always subordinate to moral and religious ones. Issues of independence, constitutions, empires, and wars all fitted into his unique perspective like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, which he turned and turned until they made an image that suited him. That image sometimes inspired others, but just as often it confused everyone except his most unquestioning followers.

The fast against the Communal Award was a good example. From his jail cell Gandhi told anyone who would listen that its real object was to sway not the British but his fellow Hindus, to convince them to shake off “the age-long superstition” of untouchability. His declared hope was that by suffering, perhaps even dying, he might change the minds of tens of millions of Hindus “and sting the Hindu conscience into right action.”
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It was disinterested self-sacrifice, as he understood it from the
Gita
: perhaps the final act of service to his country.

Others, perhaps understandably, viewed it as an overtly political act, even political grandstanding. No one expected that the British government would yield. To back off in the face of Gandhi’s threat would throw the whole constitutional process into confusion and bring down a rain of thunderbolts from the likes of Churchill and George Lloyd. Ramsay MacDonald wrote a last letter, asking Gandhi to reconsider. Gandhi thanked him but said he would stick to his decision. Many other aspects to the Communal Award, he warned, were also open to “very grave objection,” but none warranted “self immolation as my conscience has prompted me in the matter of the Depressed Classes.”
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On September 15 he wrote a touching letter to Kasturbai, who was at Sabarmati. “You have probably heard about my fast,” it read. “Do not get frightened in the slightest degree by the news and also do not let the other women get frightened.” He hoped she would understand that he had decided to fast for the sake of what was right, or
dharma
: “If, however, I have to carry it on till the end, you should indeed thank God. Only one in a million meets [the] death for which he has prayed. What good fortune it would be if I met that fate!” After fifty years of living together, she above all should understand his will and his need to do this “service.”
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