Gandhi & Churchill (93 page)

But as the viceroy repeatedly tried to explain to Churchill, India was as vital as ever to winning the war. Almost 100 percent of its production of shoes and textiles, and 75 percent of its steel production, were devoted to the Allied armies. Without India’s material support, no defeat of the Japanese in Burma or Malaya or even China was possible. Yet unless 750,000 tons of grain arrived to relieve the ongoing famine, India would face a major catastrophe: “a hungry India” might give the Japanese a second chance.
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Wavell realized that the Mahatma, despite his fading powers and fading reputation, still held at least part of the solution to India’s problems. Following Churchill’s strict instructions, however, Wavell refused to meet him.

So Gandhi tried sending a personal note. It was his usual way of trying to open a fruitful dialogue with the powers that be, to see what kind of man Wavell was and what might be possible.
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Wavell still refused, saying they could meet only if Gandhi had a concrete and constructive plan to present. Gandhi immediately responded by offering Congress’s support for the war effort in exchange for an immediate declaration of independence—the offer the Congress Working Committee had wanted back in 1942 and that Gandhi had refused.

Wavell realized this was a possible opening, but when Churchill learned of it, he exploded in a towering rage, accusing Wavell of entering negotiations with Gandhi, Britain’s “bitter enemy.” Wavell had to withdraw. Churchill “sent me a peevish telegram,” Wavell noted on July 5, “to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet!” The prime minister never responded to the viceroy’s request for more food aid. “I wonder, “Wavell mused to his diary, “if we shall ever have any chance of a solution till the three intransigent, obstinate, uncompromising principals are out of the way: Gandhi (just over 75), Jinnah (68), and Winston (nearing 70).”
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For Jinnah too was still a player, and Gandhi’s current anxiety was not just about nonviolence and Congress. The Hindu-Muslim split remained as much a gaping wound as it had been before he was arrested. Gandhi feared the war might end with the Lahore resolution of four years before still in effect. The notion of an India-Pakistan division was anathema to him: he called it a “vivisection.” The idea that it could come as a result of religion—“which binds man to God and man to man,” Gandhi protested—was even more repellent.
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Yet except for some token Muslims in the Congress like his friend Dr. Abul Kalam Azad, Muslims had stayed aloof from the Quit India movement. The Muslim League had not endorsed the British war effort but had hardly opposed it. Just as Churchill believed some mysterious clique controlled the Indian independence movement, so Gandhi was convinced that the British were the “third power” behind the communal issue and the resolution to break India apart. As with Churchill, no amount of argumentation or evidence could budge him, not even the forceful words of Jinnah himself.

Gandhi decided that a direct dialogue with Jinnah might open the way to reconciliation. The businessmen G. D. Birla and Sir P. Thakurdas had hoped for such a meeting since 1940: such was the power that the Mahatma’s words and presence were assumed to have on the obstreperous Muslim leader.
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In September Gandhi felt strong enough to start the talks and set off for Bombay.

“I am going in hope but without expectation,” he told T. B. Sapru. For three weeks he and Jinnah discussed a range of issues. Jinnah remained unmoving on his central demand, that an independent Pakistan be accepted and declared before the British left. Gandhi reached for a compromise but in vain. When Gandhi suggested that they wait to see what happened when the British left, Jinnah rejected the notion as prevarication and a waste of time. “The question of the division of India, as Pakistan and Hindustan, is only on your lips and does not come from your heart,” he angrily told Gandhi. Gandhi had no reply. Jinnah knew Gandhi was out of touch after nearly two years in prison, and he played on this weakness. “I hope to convert you to the realities and actual conditions prevailing in India today,” he said, which were that the Hindu and Muslim communities were headed in divergent directions. “By all the canons of international law, we [Muslims] are a nation,” Jinnah insisted. It was not the British who were at fault; it was a thousand years of history. This Gandhi could not accept, and so he and Jinnah parted ways.
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The meetings broke up without agreement on September 27. Viceroy Wavell, who had hoped for some kind of compromise, was bitterly disappointed. “I must say I expected better,” he wrote. “Two great mountains have met and not even a ridiculous mouse has emerged.” He saw it as a failure of Gandhi’s leadership and worried about its effect on Churchill and the cabinet. “I am afraid it will increase their dislike of any attempt at a move.”
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A tired and discouraged Gandhi returned to Sevagram. It was clear to Patel and others that he was exhausted, and in late November he agreed to undergo a full month’s rest. Wavell meanwhile was staring at the calendar. With New Year 1945 approaching, the war in Asia was nearing a climax. American troops had landed in the Philippines, while their bombers were attacking Japanese cities. The U.S. Navy and Marines were gearing up for the assault on Iwo Jima. The Japanese soldiers remaining in Burma were hopelessly trapped, even as the new overland route for supplies to China opened: the Ledo Road.

In Europe the war was going so well that the British chiefs of staffs hoped to move 370,000 men and their equipment to India for a full-scale offensive on Singapore. But the failure of Operation Market Garden to drive the Germans out of Holland, and then Hitler’s offensive in the Ardennes two months later, halted any such ambitious plan.
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But the December offensive was the Third Reich’s final gasp, while Japan was on the road to certain defeat.

Ironically, the faster the war rushed to a victorious end, the worse the situation looked for India’s future. With the war on, all issues and all parties existed in a kind of suspended animation. Once the war was over, they would start up again—and Wavell was deeply worried about the result. Almost alone among the participants, Wavell sensed that something had to be done before the war ended, not after—that is, before the catastrophe everyone feared but tried to ignore actually happened.

Churchill remained deaf to his pleas. As the winter of 1945 turned into spring, his mood was bleaker and blacker than before. On the bright side Germany was collapsing. The Russians were closing on Berlin; Burma was about to fall, and his old nemesis Gandhi had been rendered a political cipher, perhaps permanently.

But Churchill could only feel growing frustration and anger. Not for nothing was the final volume of his history of the Second World War entitled “Triumph and Tragedy.” Britain had endured and even triumphed. Churchill had knitted together the greatest alliance of nations ever seen. But Britain was exhausted. One quarter of its national wealth was gone, and its manpower had about run out. Most of its weapons, its planes and tanks, its ships and transports, were now American made. All around him were reminders that Great Britain had lost its force and credibility in the world.

Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command, which Churchill had seen as a means to restore British rule in the region,
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was now officially committed to doing the opposite. Once the Japanese were driven out, southeast Asia, beginning with Burma, would cease to be part of the British Empire. The Americans also refused to relent on their pressure on India. At one point, at the conference in Quebec in September 1944, Churchill finally blew up. “I will give the United States half of India to administer,” he said in disgust, “and we will take the other half, and we will see who does better with each other’s half.”
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It was meant in jest, but the frustration was real. His half-jocular remark could not disguise the fact that the issue of India, and the empire generally, was driving a stake through the heart of the Anglo-American alliance.

In February 1945 the Big Three met for the last time at Yalta. His doctor Lord Moran, traveling with him, saw Churchill emerge from the meetings in something close to despair. Roosevelt was ill, terminally so. The old trust and familiarity between the two leaders was gone. Churchill still referred to their friendship as “the rock on which I build the world,” but the ailing president increasingly saw Churchill “as being wholly out of touch with the times and an obstacle to peace and progress,” particularly on colonial issues.
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Instead, Roosevelt was staking the future on America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Winston knew that Roosevelt, like most American liberals, had a naïvely sanguine view of Stalin and the Soviet Union. But at Yalta Roosevelt’s credulity stretched all limits. As Lord Moran put it, the president “does not see that he has invented a Russia which does not exist.”
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Later Churchill would be blamed for Yalta’s decision to hand over most of Eastern Europe to Stalin, along a boundary line that roughly followed the future Iron Curtain. Critics point to a list that Churchill compiled for Stalin while in Moscow in October, dividing Europe into percentages of Russian and British influence.
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But what this so-called “naughty document” and the concessions at Yalta over Poland really show was that Churchill was desperate to recover what he could of Europe for the democratic world. He deeply feared that, left to their own devices, Roosevelt and Hopkins would let Stalin’s armies devour it all.

On imperial questions, the tension was even worse. Churchill was not the only Briton to feel that Americans were directly hostile to their interests. Moran’s own view was that Americans thought they were “back in the War of Independence, fighting their English oppressors at Yorktown.” But he admitted that Winston did not help matters: “When the British Empire is mentioned, he indulges in histrionics, which do no good.”
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When one of the Yalta delegates raised the question of appointing trustees to “former colonies,” the phrase inspired a particularly savage outburst. Winston’s head jerked upright, his eyes grew wide, and he began to shout, barking out sentences so quickly that some in the room could not make out what he was saying.

But the gist of it was clear. Churchill raged that he “would not have the British Empire run by a bunch of bunglers. He refused point blank to countenance such folly.” The stunned American and British delegates tried to calm him down. The American secretary of state Edward Stettinius was “thoroughly rattled” and hastened to say that no one was talking about British colonies. The trustees were for former
enemy
colonies. Winston realized his mistake but refused to be mollified. He calmed down but continued to mutter to himself, “Never, never, never.”
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His doctor realized that the Americans thought Winston’s intransigence over the empire was mostly bluff, but Lord Moran knew better: “He was affirming a faith for which he was prepared to give his life.” Churchill was only belatedly realizing that others, even in his own party, no longer shared that faith.

In private Churchill also shared more of Wavell’s fears about the future of the Raj than he let on in public. On the way to Yalta he had read a new book on the subcontinent, entitled
Verdict on India.
He told Clementine, “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up.” Britain, he believed, was “losing confidence in our mission,” confidence that had sustained the Raj for two centuries and that Churchill had hoped would sustain it again after the war. But he no longer felt it would.

“I have had for some time a feeling of despair about the British connection with India,” he confessed to his wife, “and still more about what will happen if it is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing criticism and abuses of the world and our own people.” But Churchill refused to give up—or give in. “Out of my shadows has come a renewed resolve to go fighting on as long as possible,” he wrote, “and to make sure the Flag is not let down while I am at the wheel.”
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More unwelcome news awaited when he returned home to Number 10. Wavell was mounting one last effort to make a breakthrough on an Indian constitution. His idea was to summon a conference of all the principal leaders, all Indians except himself and the commander in chief, General Auchinleck. He hoped they could agree on a transitional government now, before war’s end, made up of six Hindu representatives, six Muslims, one Sikh, and one member of the Depressed Classes (almost certainly Gandhi’s old antagonist, Dr. Ambedkar) acting as his executive council. Together with the viceroy they would assume the full administration of India, including defense, and set up plans for a constituent assembly and an Indian constitution after the war.

Wavell hoped that British sincerity about handing over power, and British insistence that Indians work out their own problems, would force a final breakthrough. His proposal arrived in London in September 1944. In December he still had no response. Amery explained to him that the cabinet was waiting for the war to end in order to dissolve, and then Churchill and Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, would battle it out in the next election. No one, least of all Churchill, was prepared to do anything definite on India until the postwar political scene was sorted out.

Amery knew what he was talking about. That same month he submitted his own plan for full and unqualified independence for India when the war ended in either Asia or Europe. He gave the India Committee a six-thousand-word proposal. Cripps was the only one to support it. Churchill and Amery then had their biggest fight yet. The prime minister lambasted both Amery and Wavell “for betraying this country’s interests in order to curry favor with the Indians.” Amery told him sharply to “stop talking nonsense” as the two bellowed at each other.