Gandhi & Churchill (87 page)

By June 1942 he had formulated his resolution, and in July he submitted it to the Congress Working Committee. The reactions were mixed, to say the least. Rajagopalachari was horrified—a sudden and total British withdrawal might mean “the dissolution of the State and society itself.” He begged the Mahatma to call the whole thing off.
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Nehru too was deeply uneasy. Gandhi was being hopelessly naïve, he understood, in assuming that the Japanese would leave India alone once the British left. Moreover such a campaign might brand the Congress members as seditionists, perhaps even fifth columnists. S. C. Bose’s brother Sarat had been arrested in December and locked up under suspicion of having had contacts with Japanese. How would the British react to such a direct and massive threat to the war effort?

In answer to these objections, Gandhi made a concession: he would allow British forces to remain in India during hostilities, although not the British government. He also conceded that a free India might enter the war on the side of the Allies. India turned into an armed camp would be distressing, but he still did not want Britain to lose. “I am more interested than the British in keeping the Japanese out,” he told the American journalist Louis Fischer. However, “I am sure Britain cannot win unless the Indian people become free.” He broadly hinted that a new government, grateful for its freedom, would gladly permit British and American soldiers to remain on Indian soil. But for now “it is not at India’s request or with India’s consent that they are here.”
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In fact, Gandhi implied that leaving India would work to Britain’s advantage, both strategically and morally: “If British rule ends, that moral act will save Britain.” In any case, it was not up to Churchill or Amery or anyone else to tell the Indians how to run their lives: “Let them entrust India to God or in modern parlance anarchy.”
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God or anarchy. Gandhi envisioned a campaign whose scale was far greater than that of the salt satyagraha. It would involve mass noncooperation at every level of society and government, with hartals, strikes, pickets, and student walk outs and sit-ins, all under the direction of Congress and all under Gandhi’s direct orders. He grimly expected trouble, even violence: “I want to guard against a sudden outburst of anarchy or a state of things that may be calculated to invite the Japanese aggression.” And the British would undoubtedly resist by any means necessary, including violence. But “I have made up my mind that it would be a good thing if a million people were shot in a brave and nonviolent resistance against the British rule.”

He was just as casual (or callous) about India’s post-British future. “All the parties will fight one another like dogs,” he conceded. It “may take us years before we can evolve order out of chaos.” But out of it must eventually come “a reasonable agreement” and an India worth living and dying for.
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In his imperious way Gandhi beat down the objections and hesitations, one by one. Watching uneasily from the sidelines, Viceroy Linlithgow admitted that “the old man has lost none of his political skill with age.”

Like Churchill, Gandhi’s power of persuasion could carry everything before them—even reasonable precaution. Linlithgow warned London that Gandhi would almost certainly get what he wanted out of Congress, even though if the campaign failed, the blow to Congress’s prestige would be immense.
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Britain and the Raj would be faced with the equivalent of mass albeit unarmed rebellion, at the war’s most crucial juncture. As the All-India Congress Committee met in Bombay to consider Gandhi’s Quit India resolution, Linlithgow and his executive council made feverish preparations.

Debate in Bombay was short, even subdued. The Congress had nowhere else to turn and no one else to follow. On August 7 the AICC passed a resolution calling on the British to immediately leave India “for the vindication of India’s inalienable right to freedom and independence” and sanctioning “the starting of a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale” if they did not. Out of 250 delegates, only thirteen cast negative votes. The delegates then asked Gandhi to lead and direct the Indian nation (although the resolution envisaged the formation of a new national government by all parties, including Muslims, once the British were gone).

The next day Gandhi returned to the dais. His speech on August 8 was one of his most riveting—his “Few” or “Finest Hour” speech. He first congratulated the delegates on passing his resolution. Then he called on all parties, including Jinnah’s Muslim League, to join with the Congress in the Quit India campaign. Finally he addressed the question of what the campaign meant.

“It is not a make believe that I am suggesting to you,” he assured them. “It is the very essence of freedom. The bond of the slave is snapped the moment he considers himself to be a free being.” Congress would not try to bargain with the viceroys this time, he promised, or negotiate concessions. If Lord Linlithgow asked Gandhi what he wanted, “I will say, ‘Nothing less than freedom.’”

As the wild cheers died down, Gandhi’s eyes flashed behind his glasses. “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you,” he said. “You may imprint it in your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is: ‘Do or Die.’ We shall either free India or die in the attempt.” This campaign, he added, was “open rebellion.”
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Even as the AICC met, Mirabehn made a quiet journey to New Delhi. She begged to see the viceroy, but he refused. She did meet with his private secretary for more than an hour, telling him, “Gandhiji is in deadly earnest. This time it will be impossible for you to hold him. No jail will contain him, no crushing force will silence him.” The government was faced with two alternatives, she said: declaring India’s independence or killing Gandhi. “And once you kill him you kill forever all hope of friendship between India and England.”

She let her words sink in, then asked, “What are you going to do about it?”
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The secretary knew all too well but said nothing. That afternoon Mirabehn caught the train to Bombay. The truth was that despite his defiant words, Gandhi hoped he could meet the viceroy before a nationwide hartal began, to convince him to convince Churchill and the cabinet to give up before “the rebellion burst.” From Mirabehn, however, Gandhi learned that such a meeting was out of the question. It was after midnight. As the banners were furled and the delegates left, he and the other Working Committee members congratulated themselves. Tomorrow they would draw up plans, write letters, and mobilize satyagrahi around the country.

Gandhi was calm but excited. The Tennyson quotation—“Do or die”—was much on his mind. “Believe me, friends, I do not wish to die,” he told them. “I want to live a full span of life. According to me, it is 120 years at least,” he joked. But “by that time India will be free, the world will be free.” As he had told the delegates, “What you think you become.”
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He went to bed full of hope for the future and for the battle to come.

He never saw the battle. At four o’clock in the morning, while Gandhi, Mirabehn, Nehru, and a dozen other Congress Working Committee members were still asleep, British police barged in and arrested them all. This time they were taken not to Yeravda but to the summer palace of the Aga Khan in Poona, lent for the purpose, where a double row of barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns guarded the perimeter. Gandhi had assumed it would take two or even three weeks for the government to act.
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But this was wartime. This time Winston Churchill, not Lord Irwin and Stanley Baldwin, was in charge. In one swift stroke, the government had decapitated the Quit India movement before it got started.

Meanwhile India erupted. News of Gandhi’s arrest set off a tidal wave of agitation and violence. There were two weeks of angry hartals in India’s major cities. Gandhi cheered them on with a message from the Aga Khan’s palace: “Everyone is free to go to the fullest length under
ahimsa,
” he wrote. “Let every non-violent soldier of freedom write out the slogan ‘do or die’ on a piece of paper or cloth and stick it on his clothes, so that in case he died in the course of offering satyagraha, he might be distinguished by that sign from other elements who do not subscribe to non-violence.”
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He expected that his incarceration would trigger violence on an even more massive scale.

The news of the Quit India resolution and Gandhi’s arrest had caught Nirad Chaudhuri by surprise. It rocked Delhi. At one point someone burst into the office and announced that the Railway Accounts Office was on fire. Chaudhuri rushed down and joined the throng watching as flames sprang out of the windows. Beyond it he could see other buildings on fire. Standing beside him were some of his Bengali friends who worked in the Railway Accounts Office. They had smiles on their faces—“I could guess they were not wholly uninvolved.” They watched silently as the building burned to its foundations. Their deed “not only satisfied their patriotic anger, but also spared them a lot of work.”
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The next day Delhi was back to normal, however, even as riots exploded in other parts of India, especially Bihar, Bombay, and the United Provinces. At one point two Canadian RAF officers were dragged from a train and murdered by a mob in Fatwah in Bihar. But otherwise, to almost everyone’s surprise, the Quit India insurrection committed almost no violence against whites, let alone British or American soldiers. Instead, the mounting wave of vandalism, sabotage, and arson was directed against government offices and the railways. Organized gangs removed railway tracks and sleepers; smashed signals and signal boxes; and cut telegraph wires and toppled telephone poles. At one point the Bihar Flying Club had to fly messages to the remoter parts of the district, since all other communication had become impossible.

Mobs also stormed police stations and post offices. All together 208 police stations were burned to the ground. Nearly 750 other government buildings were destroyed, including 50 post offices and 250 railway stations. Police and soldiers had to fire hundreds of times, killing and wounding some 2,500 people. At the height of the disorder Linlithgow and Wavell were forced to employ more than fifty battalions of British and Indian troops to impose order.
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On August 31 Linlithgow sent a tense wire to Churchill. “I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since 1857,” it read, “the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security.” What Linlithgow did not say was that some Indian Army officers had refused to confront the demonstrators. As a result the British feared that they might be facing a full-scale mutiny in Indian Army ranks—the first in India in eighty-five years.
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Even as Linlithgow sent his telegram, however, the worst riots were already over. Within a month the British managed to disperse the mobs, reopen the rail lines, and reconnect the telephone wires. Except in Bihar, everything had returned almost to normal by September 21. Trains again ran on time; government officials and ministers returned to their offices—or found new ones to replace the ones burned to the ground. Linlithgow told Secretary Amery that things were “pretty comfortable.” In just six weeks the Quit India movement, and the specter of a second Mutiny, had been crushed.

In his diary Amery wrote that Gandhi’s actions had been “dictated by the conviction that [the British] were down and out” in Asia and would leave India to cut their losses.
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Working together, Churchill, Amery, and Linlithgow had proved him wrong. Thousands would remain in prison, as many as 60,000 (although some insist the total was closer to 100,000). Yet ten months later in June 1943 Amery could write to Linlithgow, “It looks as if India had never been so quiet politically as at this moment.”
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As the last mass riots died away, Gandhi was still in the Aga Khan’s gilded cage. He had seen Quit India as the decisive campaign of his life. In fact, it was among his most fruitless. From the beginning violence, not nonviolence, was its hallmark. As an exercise in satyagraha, it had proved a miserable failure.

It had also been, in the words of Gandhi scholar Judith Brown, “patchy” and “uncoordinated.” The truth was that Gandhi had grossly underestimated the forces arrayed against him. He failed to anticipate not only the speed and ruthlessness of the British response but the Muslims’ opposition to the campaign—they were still outraged by the sabotaging of the Cripps mission.
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Gandhi had also misread the mood of the Indian public—not a difficult feat from the fastness of Sevagram. Few shared his delicate understanding of the moral stakes involved in the Second World War. Many, perhaps most Indian intellectuals, were openly pro-Axis. The Bombay and Calcutta students who joined in the riots looked to Subhas Chandra Bose, not Gandhi, as their role model and inspiration.

Most Indians living in cities, on the other hand, recognized that for them the war represented an economic opportunity. The British and American military were buying foodstuffs and equipment in unprecedented quantities. Their personnel required a range of services, from barbers and rickshaws to transport ships and tankers, as well as leather boots and cotton uniforms. Every day the Allies flew tons of supplies from India over the Himalayas (or “the Hump”) to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. Almost all the cargo was supplied by Indian merchants and manufacturers. Over the course of the war India provided £286.5 million worth of supplies.
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India’s middle class may not have loved the Raj, but it loved the money that a wartime Raj put in their wallets.

Nor did the Indian Civil Service respond to Gandhi’s call. In 1940, for the first time, the civil service had more Indian than British members (614 versus 587). Whatever their feelings about the British or independence, the overwhelming majority remained at their posts during the Quit India days. So did the Indian Army. In its quiet way, in the 1920s and 1930s, it had undergone a steady “Indianization.” Native VCOs, or viceroy’s commissioned officers, had been present in the Indian Army for decades. But beginning in 1920 a new class of native officer, the king’s commissioned Indian officer or KCIO, had appeared. Officially indistinguishable from his English counterpart, the KCIO shared the mess with British officers, enjoyed similar precedence and promotion, and some even underwent the same training at Sandhurst.