Gandhi & Churchill (90 page)

On the other side of the world, Churchill was still in the grip of a high fever. His daughter Mary came to see him on the twenty-first and was shocked at his condition. “He looked so old and tired—lying back in bed,” she told her diary. Work had become all but impossible. Oliver Harvey noted: “He is taking no papers.” But Churchill still followed the progress of Gandhi’s fast with a manic intensity. One question burned in his mind: When would the man die? On February 22 Churchill was strong enough to dictate a long letter to the king, which ended: “The old humbug Gandhi is lasting much longer than we were assured was possible…One wonders whether his fast is bona fide.”
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Once more the rumors about secret glucose infusions began.
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The surgeon-general of the Bombay Presidency, who was in constant attendance, began to suspect that the Mahatma really had been given some glucose, secretly and unwittingly, by one of his Indian doctors.
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In any case Gandhi recovered enough to agree to take some extra fruit juice with his water. Overnight on the twenty-third he pulled back from the brink of death. Across India, soldiers and policemen who had been on alert in case “the old zealot should die,” as one worried official put it, once more relaxed.

Then on February 24 Churchill’s fever finally broke. His wife told their daughter: “I can see for myself that he is better. His face looks quite different. He has lost that weary look.” Churchill wrote to Harry Hopkins: “Am feeling definitely better now. So is Gandhi.” Then: “Once he saw his antics would have no effect he took a marked turn for the better. I am so glad you did not get drawn in.”
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He also wrote a note to Linlithgow: “Bulletins look as if he might get through.” There was a distinct note of disappointment. Surely one of those Hindu doctors must have slipped him some glucose or something like it!
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To General Smuts on February 26 Churchill almost sounded triumphant: “I do not think Gandhi had the slightest intention of dying, and he has been eating better meals than I have for the last week” (that is, if glasses of water flavored with lime juice counted as a meal). “It looks now highly probable that he will see the fast through.” Churchill gave vent to a final angry thought: “What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob stuff.”
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In fact, Gandhi was recovering, but his health remained precarious and he was extremely weak. He had lost almost twenty pounds. “I had to choose between death on the one hand and sweet lime juice on the other” was his explanation for why he had given in to his doctors. “I had promised to live; I must try to live.” The next day, February 27, doctors found him in a cheerful mood when they visited at ten o’clock. He spent the day sitting on the eastern veranda of the palace, sunning himself. His daughter-in-law and his surviving secretary Pyarelal sat on a carpet nearby and read the
Gita
aloud.

“This fast was taken solely for service of God and in His presence,” he told Mirabehn. “Other people may believe or not, that does not worry me.” To Gandhi’s mind, it had been a success. However, he knew others considered it a failure. He had neither procured his release nor forced Churchill and the British to back down. The original pretext for the fast—the alleged mistreatment of his fellow prisoners—had been all but forgotten. But Gandhi refused to care. “No fast of mine has ever had such a wonderful ending as this one is having. I do not mean what is going on in the outside world,” he hastened to add, “but what is going on inside me. There is a heavenly peace.”
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On March 3 Kasturbai handed him a glass containing six ounces of orange juice diluted with water. Gandhi sipped it and immediately broke down in tears. He sipped the glass for another twenty minutes, while thanking his doctors, British and Indian, for their attention. His fast was over. Over the next four days he lived on orange juice, then was ready for goat’s milk, more fruit juice, and his first solid food in nearly a month: orange and lemon pulp.
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Not surprisingly, Churchill was uncharitable in his triumph. “It seems the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast,” he cabled Linlithgow, thanking him once again for “your own strong, cool, sagacious handling of the matter.” Linlithgow told Churchill that Britain had won “an important victory, which will help to discredit a wicked system of blackmail and terror, and I am much obliged to you for your staunch support.”
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Later Churchill would remember the entire crisis as one that “caused me at the time much anxiety,” since Gandhi’s death “could have produced a profound impression throughout India.” But in the end, “convinced of our obduracy, [Gandhi] abandoned his fast, and his health, though he was very weak, was not seriously affected.” Churchill and the viceroy “had judged the situation rightly,” and a major crisis had been averted. India and the empire were safe.
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But Churchill was wrong. The British were back to where they started. At first Gandhi’s gesture did indeed seem to backfire. Nirad Chaudhuri remembered that in Delhi the news of the fast left “a strange tenseness on the faces of my colleagues, which was like the restlessness of the tigers and lions in zoos when their feeding time approached.” For two weeks the reports of Gandhi’s condition had been alarming. People reacted with indignation and fury when told that Churchill had said the Mahatma was given glucose with his water.
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Chaudhuri even took the precaution of drawing up Gandhi’s obituary for the Indian Information Office.

Then came news that the fast was over. “There was no anger at all,” he recalled, “only blank disappointment at the evaporation of a great hope…There was not even any expression of relief.” Instead “nobody spoke about Gandhi anymore.” Everyone’s attention was on the war and the mounting series of Allied victories. Chaudhuri spoke to an elderly Bengali living in Delhi, a nationalist who had confidently awaited Britain’s defeat. Chaudhuri asked him what he thought now if Britain won. “I shall believe there is no God,” the disappointed old man said.
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If God and Gandhi had disappointed the Indians, other events would make Churchill’s triumph seem short-lived.

The Great Bengal Famine, one of the great human catastrophes of the twentieth century, did as much, perhaps more, to undermine Indian confidence in the Raj than anything Gandhi had done. Ironically, while Gandhi flirted with death by voluntarily starving himself, thousands—even tens of thousands—were starving to death through no fault of their own.

In mid-October 1942 a devastating cyclone ripped through the coastal regions of East Bengal, or what is today Bangladesh. The storm killed thousands and devastated the autumn rice crop up to forty miles inland. Bengali peasants ate the rice that should have been planted that winter. When the hot weather came in May 1943, the rice crop would be a fraction of what it should have been to feed Bengal’s peasantry.

Making matters worse, the British Empire had lost Burma, the main source of India’s rice imports. Within a month starvation was staring all of southeastern India in the face. The government of Bengal was unprepared; too much rice had already been shipped off to feed troops in the Middle East and Ceylon. As the hot weather came, people began to die. By September relief centers were overwhelmed with “rickety babies with arms and legs like sticks; nursing mothers with wrinkled faces; children with swollen faces and hollow-eyed…Walking skeletons all of them.”
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In mid-October the death rate in Calcutta reached more than two thousand a month. British and American soldiers were horrified to step out of a Calcutta cinema and find people literally dying in the street, while vultures, crows, and kites circled overhead.

It was the greatest humanitarian crisis the Raj had faced in more than half a century. But either because officials were too distracted (Bengal’s governor fell ill and died during the crisis, leaving an administrative vacuum at the top) or were too slow to react, or simply did not care, the magnitude of what was happening did not reach the attention of London until it was too late.
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Secretary of State Leo Amery at first took a lofty Malthusian view of the crisis, arguing that India was “overpopulated” and that the best strategy was to do nothing. But by early summer even Amery was concerned and urged the War Cabinet to take drastic action to prevent mass starvation—and a collapse of the Indian home front.

For his part, Churchill proved callously indifferent. Since Gandhi’s fast his mood about India had progressively darkened. Despite what he imagined as the Mahatma’s crushing defeat, the British were left with the same problems as before. Linlithgow saw little hope of arriving at a political settlement before or after the war ended, regardless of Gandhi.
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Churchill’s doubts about the Indian Army’s loyalty again bubbled to the surface. In May Churchill ripped into Amery, accusing him of “creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys.” He even spoke of the horrors of the 1857 Mutiny, Amery noted, “and was really almost childish about it.”
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Churchill proved just as irrational over the famine issue: he was resolutely opposed to any food shipments. Ships were desperately needed for the landings in Italy, which was slated for September even though the Americans opposed the invasion. Sending food to India would mean a loss of valuable transport. Besides, Churchill felt it would do no good. Famine or no famine, Indians will “breed like rabbits.” Amery remembered, “Naturally I lost patience and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s, which annoyed him no little.”
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But unwittingly, Churchill did break the famine. Amery prevailed on him to send some relief, albeit only a quarter what was needed.
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But then in October 1943 Churchill’s handpicked new viceroy arrived, General Archibald Wavell.

Until now Wavell had been best known for his willingness to accept responsibility for the failures of others, an indispensable skill in politics and in the military. Having been head of Britain’s Middle East command when the war broke out, he had watched while, over his protests, large numbers of his troops were transferred to the abortive campaign in Greece. The result was the collapse of British forces in North Africa under Rommel’s assault. That led to Wavell’s transfer from the Middle East to commander in chief in India, where he arrived in time to oversee the fall of Singapore and the rout from Burma, events he had not caused and had been helpless to prevent.

Wavell had been raised in India, the son of a major-general, then was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst and joined the Black Watch regiment in 1900. Most recently he had managed to pull India’s defenses together, despite slender resources, and crushed the Quit India rebellion before it jeopardized Britain’s strategic position or opened the door to any Japanese incursion. Wavell had a shrewd, penetrating mind and an immunity to cant and conventional wisdom. It was Wavell who had first labeled the Versailles treaty, ending the First World War, as “the peace to end all peace.” He understood that politicians invariably found ways to create disasters, which soldiers, like himself, had to clean up.

Churchill appointed him viceroy on the assumption that the general would endorse his own hard line. In fact, Wavell would emerge as the best viceroy India ever had. He would chart a new path for its future, one that avoided the pitfalls left by Winston and the Mahatma, his fellow Boer War veterans.

Certainly Wavell found his conversations with his predecessors and colleagues no help. In August he met with Halifax and “got nothing particularly fresh from him,” although the former viceroy said he “did not find Gandhi a practical person to deal with…and thinks he is probably worse now.” He soon realized that Amery and Churchill were at loggerheads over what to do about India: at a meeting of the cabinet’s India Committee on October 7 Amery talked too long and Churchill “waved the bogey of Gandhi at everyone.” Oddly, the best advice Wavell got was from Winston’s son Randolph, whom he met en route to India in Gibraltar. “He said I went to India with one great advantage over the last few Viceroys,” Wavell wrote in his diary. “They had to decide whether and when to lock up Gandhi, I should find him already locked up.”
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The formalities of his installation as viceroy were a far more stripped-down affair than in Curzon’s or even Linlithgow’s time. This was wartime, and India was an armed camp. Thousands of British, American, Australian, and East African soldiers were arriving daily. Twenty-five thousand Chinese troops were training in Ramgarh. Orde Wingate’s Chindits long-range guerrilla group had recently returned from its second successful raid into Burma, which proved beyond doubt that British and Indian soldiers could beat the Japanese in jungle conditions. After a conversation with Linlithgow, Wavell concluded that the Bengal famine could put the entire war effort in peril and that it would end only if the military stepped in. Wavell branded it “one of the worst disasters that had befallen any people living under British rule.” Yet no one had thought to ask the army for help.

His first trip after his swearing-in ceremony was to Calcutta, where he and his wife visited a relief center and spoke to the starving victims. Wavell turned his forces loose to transport rice and food supplies from places where it was actually in surplus, like the Punjab, to areas that needed it most. (In a terrible irony the rice harvest of the autumn of 1943 was one of the biggest in India’s history.)
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He had to bully Churchill into agreeing to send more food. The prime minister “seemed to regard sending food to India as an ‘appeasement’ of Congress,” Wavell realized in disgust. Only his direct threat to resign finally compelled Churchill to back down.
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Within a few months Wavell brought India back from the brink of demographic disaster. Still, as many as three million Indians had died, and food shortages continued until the end of the Raj.
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