Gandhi & Churchill (80 page)

One of those enthusiasms was also for Stalin’s Soviet Union. A host of European and English socialists in the 1930s, including Churchill’s old mentors the Webbs, had deluded themselves into believing that Russia was the model of social perfection. So it became nirvana for Nehru as well. Nehru, like other British leftists, would accept the mendacious Moscow show trials at face value. It is in Stalin’s Russia, he wrote in April 1936, that “we find the essentials of democracy present in far greater degree among the masses there than anywhere else.” This was in the aftermath of the Great Famine and just before Stalin’s purges got into high gear.
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Nehru never became a Communist, although he did cooperate with India’s fledgling Communist Party. But he did see the world, including India, through simplistic Marxist stereotypes of imperialism, capitalism, and “socialist democracy,” a code phrase for Soviet-style, top-down dictatorship. If S. C. Bose saw Germany and Italy as the blueprint for his country’s future, Nehru’s blueprint was the “workers’ paradise” of Soviet Russia.

So while Nehru strongly endorsed Gandhi’s diagnosis of India’s ills as the result of “British imperialism,” he rejected Gandhi’s solutions. Certainly he paid lip service to the principles of civil disobedience and satyagraha, but he saw them purely in terms of political leverage, and he privately fumed over their overt religious dimension. If Gandhi believed in the law of ahimsa, Nehru believed in the law of class conflict. The Mahatma’s “continual references to God irritate me exceedingly,” Nehru confessed as early as 1933, and he was just as upset over Gandhi’s pro-British feelings now.
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At once Nehru saw that the war offered an opportunity to hold Britain’s feet to the fire over independence, just as Annie Besant had tried to do during World War I. It took Nehru four days of adroit negotiation to craft the statement he and Congress leaders released on September 14. It was full of platitudes about democracy and fighting oppression, and condemnations of Nazism and fascism. But it also put the blame for the crisis squarely on the British and the French and denounced their colonial empires. “The true measure of democracy is the ending of imperialism and fascism alike,” the statement read; “the horror has to be checked in Europe and China, but it will not end until its root causes, fascism and imperialism, are removed” and until India was finally free.
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The September 14 statement (or September Manifesto, as Nehru preferred to call it) offered the British a choice, or rather an ultimatum. Congress would support the war effort in exchange for a declaration that India would be granted full and complete independence. Unless Congress got the latter, it would take specific steps to ensure Britain never got the former.

Neither the thinking nor the ultimatum reflected Gandhi’s view. He had hoped to convince the Congress to endorse his own plan for unconditional, but also nonviolent, support of the British, but the Congress turned him down. He felt he had no choice but to go along. “Of all the organizations of the world,” he wrote in
Harijan,
“the Congress is the best fitted to show it the better way, indeed the only way, to the true life.” To break publicly with Nehru and the leadership now, he felt, would only expose just how divided the Congress was over the war and much else.
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Indeed the Indian National Congress truly
was
divided, perhaps more than at any time in a decade. If the British government refused his ultimatum, Nehru’s next step was to have all Congress officials quit their elected offices in the provincial legislatures. But in truth they were quite happy with their jobs and their success in governing. In the words of one historian, the British experiment in cooperating with the Congress in the late 1930s had “paid off spectacularly.”
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At first, British officials were skeptical about Congress’s ability to govern. But the disciplined Congress cadres provided more stable governments in their eight provinces than non-INC governments in the other three. Linlithgow himself called it “a distinguished record of public achievement.” Indeed, two governors of Congress-dominated provinces, Madras and the United Provinces, published articles about their extraordinary success to serve as blueprints for Indian government in the future. They revealed how maintaining law and order, organizing public works, and maintaining sanitation were all easier with the help of a popularly elected legislature. Veteran Indian Civil Service men learned to respect and like their Indian counterparts in the field. For the first time, thanks to the new constitution, Indians exercised a “very real influence over government.” Meanwhile the recruitment of Englishmen for the civil service, instead of declining after the India Act as Churchill and others had forecast, remained strong.
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The September Manifesto threatened to overturn this happy state of affairs and to prove the critics right: the Indian National Congress really
was
ready to stab Britain in the back. Just as the self-government experiment was getting under way, Winston Churchill had expressed misgivings to Linlithgow about cooperating with enemies of Britain like the Congress, but Linlithgow had demurred. “My strong impression is that these men are sincere in what they say,” he wrote. Trends pointed to more cooperation, even in the princely states. “Take it from me,” he told Churchill, “the old order…is dying fast.” But Linlithgow had also warned that Nehru might still endanger any new order and that legislators “are very hard hunted by their left wing.”
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Now what Linlithgow had feared seemed to be coming to pass.

Anxious to find a way to answer the September Manifesto, Linlithgow met with no less than fifty-two different Indian politicians, including Nehru, Gandhi, R. Prasad, and Muhammad Jinnah. The result was fifty-two different opinions about what to do next. Linlithgow believed Gandhi was willing to arrange a compromise, perhaps even accept the All-India Federation plan. But the pressure from Nehru was too strong. “Whatever his hesitations as to the soundness of Nehru’s policy,” Linlithgow wrote to Lord Zetland, Gandhi felt duty bound to support him even in things “which would never have commended themselves to the old man himself had he still been in sole and effective charge.”
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On October 17 Linlithgow felt he had no choice but to publicly and finally turn the Congress down. Gandhi’s reaction was angry and swift. “The Viceregal declaration is profoundly disappointing,” he told the press. He dismissed Linlithgow’s offer to summon an All Parties Conference to sort out their difference as “the old policy of divide and rule.” He wrote on October 30 for
Harijan
: “The Congress support would have put the British cause on an unassailable moral basis…But God has willed otherwise.”
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Meanwhile every Congress official, most very reluctantly, had resigned from provincial office. Nehru achieved what he had secretly wanted to do six months earlier: force a showdown with the Raj. The declaration of war had been a useful pretext. But at the same time the “potentially fruitful experiment” in Indian self-government under British supervision collapsed.
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Only one other person was actually pleased with this result: Muhammad Ali Jinnah. When he learned Congress officials were quitting all their posts, Jinnah’s gaunt face broke into one of his rare smiles, and he officially declared December 22, 1939, a day of thanksgiving for Muslims. He had ignored appeals from Nehru and Gandhi to join them in the September Manifesto. He knew Congress had made a serious, possibly fatal error. The demise of the Indian National Congress was a new opportunity for the Muslim League and a new dawn for the idea of a separate Islamic state.

There could be no grounds for reconciliation, he was now fully convinced. “The Hindus and Moslems belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions,” he was telling followers.
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He no longer had any reason to pretend otherwise. So as the dry season came and Gandhi retired to Sevagram and Nehru and other Congress officials debated their next step, Jinnah made his move.

On March 22, 1940, more than sixty thousand men gathered in Lahore and occupied a gigantic tent in Minto (now Allama Iqbal) Park for a meeting of the Muslim League. The next day—as Germany was preparing to invade Norway and Japan to install a puppet regime in Nanking—Jinnah and the league passed a public resolution calling for a separate Islamic state.

The Lahore Resolution came as a surprise to the viceroy, a bitter defeat to Nehru, and a personal wound to Gandhi. But Gandhi more than anyone had helped to prepare the way for it. His emergence as the Mahatma had solidified his support among Hindus and step by step made him the spiritual authority of an entire nation. But step by step it had also alienated Muslims. When Gandhi described himself as a Hindu of Hindus, Muslims seethed. “Everything about him, his dietary habits, his clothes, his sexual abstinence, his prayers, his ashrams,” all highlighted his status as a holy man to the Hindu masses but anathematized him among Muslims.
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To Jinnah’s mind, the instigator for creating two nations, Hindu and Muslim, was neither the British nor himself but Gandhi. Now Jinnah was only waiting for the British to take their leave to put the final touches on the process. The war barely entered into the Muslim leader’s calculations.
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Any declaration of an independent “India” would now be a dead letter and bring harsh recriminations, or worse, from the followers of the Muslim League.

Jinnah’s hard line left the Indian National Congress stranded. Foiled by the British, betrayed by the Muslims, hopelessly divided over what to do next, the Congress turned in desperation to the one man who still might save them.

He had retreated back to Sevagram. “I have become disconsolate,” Gandhi had admitted when the war broke out. “In the secret of my heart I am in perpetual quarrel with God that He should allow such things to go on. My non-violence seems almost impotent.” Still, he realized that it was not God or even nonviolence that was helpless but man. “I must try [to go] on,” he concluded, “without losing faith even though I may break in the attempt.”
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The clashes over the September Manifesto only served to deepen Gandhi’s gloom.

But he never allowed the war news, the storms over resignations, or the bitter Congress rivalries to dominate his mind. Over the new year Gandhi returned to the work he considered most meaningful: to encourage khadi and home spinning, to support the campaign for the Harijans, and to preach the message of ahimsa.

He found time to advise a high school in Baroda, when he learned the students were not using the charkha. He wrote about communal violence in Sukkur and Shikarpur in the Sind; he took up the cause of using unadulterated ghee or clarified butter. He sent a reproachful memo to the members of the ashram: “Everyone must observe restraint in eating. Eight ounces of greens at a time should be deemed sufficient.”

He arranged for someone to go with a friend to have his teeth extracted, and he advised another on how to relax. “Don’t devote more than twenty minutes to massage,” he warned. “You should read, rest, or spin during the rest of the time.”
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His push for khadi remained unrelenting, and he organized a large handcraft fair to be part of the next Congress meeting when delegates assembled at Ramargh in late March.

Gandhi spoke at Ramargh in open session, for the first time since 1934. The Congress needed leadership; he wanted followers. But he arrived full of misgivings about the Congress members: “There is no doubt that many are corrupt,” he had said a year earlier.
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He was also worried about the future of nonviolence and not just because of events in Europe. He told Nehru that he had heard people were displaying placards around India “asking people to cut wires and tear rails.” He said, “If people take the law into their own hands, I must give up all command of [the] civil disobedience movement.”
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On March 13 a Punjabi student studying in London murdered former governor Michael O’Dwyer and wounded Secretary Zetland and two others.
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As Gandhi mounted the dais at Ramargh, he sensed that satyagraha might be making its last stand.

His opening quotation from the Gospel of Saint Matthew—“Not Everyone that sayeth to me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”—puzzled the delegates, but they responded with a tremendous cheer. Gandhi cut them short. “I do not need your cheers,” he said reproachfully. “I want to win your hearts and intellects, and your cheers stand in the way of winning them.”

The multitude fell silent as he continued. “I feel you are not prepared” for “civil disobedience properly launched and conducted,” he told them. “We all realize that we will have to fight for freedom.” The delegates cheered, but again he angrily stopped them.

“Your claps only demonstrate that you do not understand what this preparation means,” he scolded them. “Your General finds that you are not ready, that you are not real soldiers and…that we are bound to be defeated.” Then Gandhi read them their marching orders. The Indian National Congress, he said, would have to follow his formula for satyagraha exactly and without question. Every member of the Congress must be personally committed to khadi and using the spinning wheel daily—“no one who does not believe in the charkha can be a soldier under me,” he sternly told them. They must uphold an absolute standard of ahimsa: “With me there is no other alternative to non-violence.” Above all, every member of the Congress must have love, not hatred, in their hearts.

“All the sermons you heard today against British imperialism,” he warned, will not help. “They will only make you angry.” But “we have no quarrel with the British people…We want to be their friends and retain their goodwill, not on the basis of their domination, but on the basis of a free and equal India.”