Gandhi & Churchill (89 page)

Instead, the police had pounced, and his movement had been left leaderless and rudderless. If the government had waited, he said, “the reported deplorable destruction would have most certainly been avoided.” For Gandhi was tortured by the constant news of violence, vandalism, and mayhem going on outside—exactly what he had hoped and planned to avoid. He importuned Linlithgow to stop its repressive measures, to release the Congress leaders, and to allow the Congress to calm the country down. On September 26 he sent an emotional letter detailing his proposal. All he got back was a brief dry note acknowledging its receipt.

Even as he tried to maintain his regular routine of spinning, praying, and reading newspapers, someone crucial to that routine was missing. Mahadev Desai had been arrested along with Gandhi and the others and imprisoned with them. But just six days later he had suddenly suffered a seizure and died. “Jail doctors did all they could,” Gandhi wrote to a friend, “but God had willed otherwise.” Kasturbai lamented, “Bapu has lost his right
and
his left hand.”
²
Desai’s place as secretary would be taken by others, but as a calm and calming presence, he had helped to keep Gandhi anchored in the real world. Some of the difficulties to come might have been avoided if Desai had been alive and at his side.

Disturbing stories of the mistreatment of prisoners, rioters and satyagrahi alike in various Indian prisons, reached Gandhi. Another detainee, a Professor Bhansali, had launched a hunger strike to protest the beatings at a prison in Chimur. Gandhi asked Linlithgow for permission to meet Bhansali to dissuade him from continuing. The government refused. Then on New Year’s Eve Gandhi told the viceroy he might have to go on a hunger strike himself. “I do not want to use it if I can avoid it,” he wrote. “This is the way to avoid it: convince me of my error or errors, and I shall make ample amends.”
³

Gandhi was desperate to open some kind of dialogue, to find a way to become relevant again as India slid into apathy under British wartime rule. Linlithgow had made it clear that the government held Gandhi personally responsible for the violence and death in the Quit India riots, an idea that tormented Gandhi. “I seem to be the
fons et origo
of all the evil imputed to the Congress,” he wrote sarcastically. “You throw in my face the facts of murders by persons reputed to be Congressmen…My answer is that the Government goaded the people to the point of madness.”
⁴

Linlithgow replied that the government might relent if Gandhi renounced the Quit India resolution. This Gandhi would not and could not do. So on January 29, 1943, Gandhi said he would undertake a fast of twenty-one days, to end on March 2.

Even his closest supporters could not understand why he was doing it. He explicitly said it was not a “fast unto death,” like the one he had used to wreck the Communal Award in 1932. But with his failing heart and high blood pressure, no one believed he could survive a fast of ten days, let alone twenty-one. Linlithgow angrily wrote back, accusing Gandhi of using blackmail. This accusation was probably just. Gandhi told the viceroy he was fasting because “I cannot get soothing balm for my pain,” an ambiguous phrase that he chose not to clarify.
⁵
Certainly he meant the pain of seeing India still in subjection to the British, and of learning of new outbreaks of violence and fresh arrests. But he also likely meant the pain of being isolated in his easeful prison, unable to guide events to the triumphant denouement he envisioned.

Behind the decision to fast was another careful calculation. Gandhi’s previous fasts had triggered his immediate release from prison. He assumed the same would happen this time. But he did not reckon on the intransigence of Linlithgow—or Winston Churchill.

In fact, two days before Gandhi’s fast was to begin, the government did offer to let him go, but only for the duration of fast itself. He could go anywhere, and with anyone he wanted, the viceroy told him, as long as he was fasting. But afterward he would have to be back in Poona. Not surprisingly, Gandhi refused. “You have left me no loophole for escaping the ordeal I have set before myself,” he complained. Linlithgow then said in effect: Whatever happens, let it be on your head. In the meantime Gandhi would be allowed to see any doctors and any visitors he chose. On February 10, one day later than originally planned, Gandhi began the fast.
⁶

Churchill was informed of what Gandhi was up to while he was in Casablanca, attending another Allied summit conference.
^*114
He now faced the challenge that successive British governments had faced from Gandhi. Churchill was determined to show resolution where they (in his view) had shown weakness. He was convinced that the fast was meaningless street theater by the man whom Indians revered for his “saintly qualities,” but whom Churchill thought a fakir and spiritual quack.

One man decided to set him straight on that last matter. It was General Jan Christiaan Smuts, now Field Marshal Smuts and president of South Africa. He and Churchill had met in London in August 1942, shortly after Gandhi was arrested. Churchill admired Smuts more than any other Dominion leader, perhaps more than any other living man. They had been opponents in the Boer War; they had been cabinet colleagues during the First World War. They shared many values, including a deep repugnance for Nazism and fascism, and the desire to see the commonwealth safe and the war ended.

They did not, however, share the same view of Gandhi. Smuts had dealt with the Mahatma firsthand, and had felt the impact of his penetrating mind and negotiating skill as well as his passionate single-mindedness. He frankly cautioned Churchill against underestimating him.

“He is a man of God,” the South African president said. “You and I are mundane people. Gandhi has appealed to religious motives. You never have. That is
where you have failed
.”

It was an extraordinary remark to make in August 1942. Thanks to Churchill, Britain had just survived the threat of invasion and the devastation of the Blitz. Many saw the war turning around, again thanks to Churchill. But clearly Smuts was referring not to the war but to Britain’s future in India.

Churchill chose to take Smuts’s remark as a joke. “I have made more bishops than anyone since St. Augustine,” he said with a grin. But Smuts was not joking.

“There is a pattern in history,” Smuts added, “but it is not easy to follow,” meaning for any mortal man to follow.
⁷
After years of effort Smuts had finally grasped the secret of Gandhi’s continuing resolve and the fact that, although he was in prison, Gandhi was still the single most powerful man in India.

What Smuts the philosopher could see, and Churchill could not, was the Mahatma’s supreme spirituality, which had made him revered across India and even in the West. It was a power that few others understood. Most in Gandhi’s own inner circle had given up trying. Instead, they had learned to obey it as a matter of principle. Others followed simply as a matter of instinct, as if in obedience to a natural leader.

It was this power that Churchill had never before confronted head-on. During their forty years of encounters and conflicts, he had never understood Gandhi, any more than Gandhi had understood
him
. The reason was simple. The confrontation in February 1943 was not just between two willful men, or between imperialism and freedom, or between what Louis Fischer later called “the past of England and the future of India.” It was no longer even between two different conceptions of empire.

The confrontation, rather, was between two different conceptions of life. One rested on secular and humanistic traditions that had been tested by history and centuries of human conflict. The other rested on a vision of spiritual purity in which history and material things (including Gandhi’s own body) counted for nothing. Churchill valued human liberty as the product of struggle, as man’s supreme achievement. Gandhi, by contrast, valued liberty as
God’s
supreme achievement. It was man’s duty to live up to that standard. Without it, Gandhi believed, life was meaningless, including his own. “I would far rather that India perished,” he once remarked, “than that she won freedom at the price of truth”—meaning God’s truth.
⁸

In short, both men loved freedom and liberty, but of two fundamentally different kinds. Both were capable of great ruthlessness in pursuit of their goals precisely because of their confidence in those twin but opposite visions, which had sustained them through defeats and disappointments that would have destroyed weaker human beings. Together they might have complemented each other’s strengths and bolstered each other’s weaknesses. Instead, in February 1943 they went head to head in a final contest of wills, with the fate of India and the Second World War at stake.

Churchill still refused to believe Gandhi was in earnest. He wrote to Linlithgow on February 13: “I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.” Linlithgow verified that it was
not
true.
⁹
He knew Gandhi was all too serious, and that if Gandhi died, it would set off a cataclysmic reaction around India.

For the first three days of the fast Gandhi’s spirits were up. He greeted friends and even went for morning and evening walks around the palace grounds, although he was living on nothing but water with a few drops of lemon juice. Then he began to slow down. After a while he found it tiring and difficult to speak.

On February 16 six British doctors examined him and pronounced that his condition had “further deteriorated.” Linlithgow passed the news on to London. He and his council agreed that Gandhi should not be allowed to die in prison.
¹⁰
But could they convince Churchill of the same thing?

By an extraordinary coincidence, at the very moment when Gandhi’s health was becoming grave, so was Winston Churchill’s. A week after returning from Algiers, on February 1, the prime minister had come down with a bad head cold. On the evening of February 16 his temperature suddenly shot up. His doctor examined his chest and told his patient he had found a “patch” at the base of his left lung.

“What do you mean by ‘patch,’” Churchill angrily demanded. “Have I got pneumonia?”
¹¹

X-rays the next morning confirmed the diagnosis. For a man approaching seventy, pneumonia was a very grave matter. It carried the real possibility of death, just as a prolonged fast did for a man of seventy-three. And for the prime minister of a great country in the midst of a world war, it might mean disaster.

Churchill was sent to bed, where his temperature continued to climb. Although he insisted on working, he was clearly not up to his regular routine. Finally his assistants made him agree to look at only the most important and urgent bulletins. The only other thing he was allowed to read was a novel.
^*115
For almost two weeks Churchill and Gandhi spent their duel of wills flat on their backs, surrounded by doctors and officials who were fearful of the worst.

Gandhi’s condition, meanwhile, continued to slide. On the seventeenth the Indian members of the viceroy’s executive council all walked out in protest of Gandhi’s condition. The Central Legislature held a major debate on the fast and passed a resolution calling for Gandhi’s immediate release. But Linlithgow could do nothing. He had Churchill’s instructions: Gandhi was going to stay where he was.

From February 19 until February 25 Churchill himself was almost completely out of action. He ran a high fever and felt as ill as he had ever been. But he was still not too ill to send a message to Linlithgow, thanking him “for your steadfast and unflinching action…as the Gandhi episode approaches its climax. It is a great comfort to me.”
¹²
Churchill also had news from Lord Halifax, now ambassador in Washington, D.C.: Roosevelt was concerned about Gandhi’s condition and strongly felt that the Mahatma should not be allowed to die in prison.

Despite his fever Churchill fired off a furious reply. There was no way the British government “will in any circumstances alter the course it is pursuing about Gandhi.” Churchill angrily warned that any interference “would make a great embarrassment between the two Governments.”
¹³
Once again the Americans got the message. “We cannot have a serious breach, personal or political, with [Churchill] now,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull concluded, “even if we were disposed to do so.”
¹⁴
He, Roosevelt, and everyone else around the world could only wait and see if Gandhi survived his self-imposed ordeal.

Crowds of people gathered around the palace at Poona. Hundreds of telegrams bombarded the viceroy, beseeching or demanding that Gandhi be released. Meanwhile British doctors examined Gandhi’s almost inert form. He was now taking only water. He was almost continually nauseated. The doctors urged that he be given immediate intravenous feeding. Gandhi’s Indian physicians refused. It would kill him, they said. Gandhi regarded any form of injection—even to save his life—as a form of violence. They could not give their consent. The British doctors finally gave up.
¹⁵
Linlithgow allowed the crowd outside to enter the palace and file one by one past Gandhi’s bed. His sons Devadas and Ramdas arrived. Kasturbai sat in his room day and night. She at least was convinced that Bapu was going to die.

On February 23, the thirteenth day of the fast, Gandhi’s kidneys began to fail. His pulse was so feeble the doctors could barely feel it, and his skin felt cold and moist. Kasturbai knelt to pray. She was bidding farewell to her husband.