Gandhi & Churchill (94 page)

After a few minutes of this angry spectacle Sir John Simon passed Amery a note: “You had better drop it, Leo.” Later Amery apologized to Churchill for his “strong language” but complained to his diary, “I wish he would talk to me about these matters and find out how they really stood.” Indeed, he doubted that Winston had even bothered to read the proposal.
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He sensed that Wavell’s proposal would get the same response, or worse.

The viceroy refused to be put off. He pleaded for a personal meeting with the cabinet; he was willing to leave for London at once. In January he was told that late March would be the earliest Churchill could see him. A few weeks later he was told mid-June. Wavell finally blew up and told Churchill he was going to resign. That finally worked, and the next day the cabinet gave him permission to leave for England.
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Wavell arrived in late March 1945 and would spend nearly two months in London waiting for a final reply. Day after day the India Committee of the cabinet bandied the issue back and forth. Churchill as usual “indulged in wild and indeed scarcely sane tirades,” according to Amery, and was “more hopelessly garrulous and time wasting than ever.” He poured scorn on “that ass Wavell and that traitor Auchinleck” for dreaming up such a conference and then “talked rubbish about abolishing landlords and money-lenders,” and returning the land to the peasants—a bizarrely Gandhi-like theme which had become a virtual obsession with him.
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Amery again felt the heavy hand of Winston’s scorn. The prime minister had convinced himself that Amery had put Wavell up to the plan whereas, as Amery admitted a year earlier, “it is rather Wavell who had insisted on pushing forward his view.”
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The wearisome tussle dragged on week after week. Finally in mid-April the India Committee agreed to let the full cabinet hear the viceroy’s proposal.

On the last day of May, Wavell was summoned to the Cabinet Room. The entire cabinet was there, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who had told Wavell the day before that he thought everyone was inclined to back his proposal. All except Churchill, of course, who opened the meeting with a fiercely negative rant. He warned Wavell that his proposal would doom India and the Indians.

“You will lose a good [Executive] Council and get a bad one,” he said, adding that the new government would have no democratic foundation. “The workers would be victimized by the capitalists, the agriculturalists by the money-lenders, the Untouchables would remain untouchables, etc. etc.,” Wavell remembered. Then he invited Wavell to speak.

Wavell did. “The P.M. gave me a good run and did not interrupt,” although Leo Amery interjected his own views on the subject at length until Churchill finally had to cut him off.
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Then Churchill said, somewhat surprisingly after his first negative sally, that he was prepared to agree to the conference if the India Committee amended parts of Wavell’s draft that afternoon.

“The climax of my visit was an extraordinary one,” Wavell noted in his journal. He met with the prime minister and the full cabinet again at ten-thirty that evening. Churchill gave a speech in favor of the proposal that was as forceful as the one against it that morning. Wavell exclaimed to himself, “What an extraordinary man he is!”
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Churchill then said Wavell could summon his conference and meet with any leaders he chose, including Gandhi. The only condition the cabinet was going to impose was that it be put on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. There could be no further negotiations or discussions.

And so finally, at eleven-thirty p.m., just twelve hours before his train was scheduled to leave, Wavell got everything he wanted after eight months of waiting. “It all ended in an atmosphere of good will and congratulations—only temporary, I fear.”
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Wavell was right. Certainly Churchill was in an ebullient mood. On May 7 Germany had at last surrendered. Hitler was dead, having taken his own life in the ruins of Berlin. The long struggle that Churchill had pursued for four years, with every ounce of his energy and passion, was finally over. On May 8 a vast crowd gathered at Whitehall to celebrate what was dubbed V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day. Winston, Eden, Attlee, and his other colleagues appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health and waved. The crowd yelled its approval.

Winston stepped to the microphone and spoke.

“God bless you all,” he said. “This is your victory!”

With one voice, the immense crowd roared back, “No—it is
yours
!” It was the British people’s spontaneous and unforgettable tribute to the man whose spirit had pulled them through the war, from the darkest days of the Blitz to the fall of Germany.

Churchill paused and went on. “We were the first, in this ancient land, to draw the sword against tyranny. We were all alone for a whole year…Did anyone want to give in?”

The crowd shouted back,
“No!”

“Were we down-hearted?”

“No!”
came the answer.

“The lights went out and the bombs came down,” Churchill said. “But every man, woman, and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle…So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out of the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered…

“Now we have emerged from one deadly struggle,” Winston told his ecstatic audience. “But there is another foe who occupies large portions of the British Empire, a foe stained with cruelty and greed—the Japanese.” Russia had pledged to enter the fight against the last remaining Axis power, he told them, joining forces with Britain and America. “We will go hand in hand with them. Even if it is a hard struggle we will not be the ones who will fail.”
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It was an unforgettable moment. “And yet,” Churchill’s doctor noted, “the PM does not seem at all excited about the end of the war.” Perhaps it was because Churchill knew the struggle was just beginning, and not against Japan. In the aftermath of V-E Day his coalition cabinet had broken up. Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin had hoped to win the Labour Party’s endorsement of keeping it together at least until Japan’s defeat, but the party refused. They were, Churchill said, “boiling with hate.” They were looking forward to the general election in July; they saw the war’s end as an opportunity to launch a new social order in Britain—ironically, part of what Churchill had fought the war to prevent.

Churchill’s relationship with his own people had reached a turning point. As his doctor told him, “There are two opposing ideas in the country. There’s pretty universal gratitude to you, [but] there’s a notion about that you aren’t very keen on this brave-new-world business.”

“The desire for a new world is nothing like universal” was Churchill’s dismissive response. “The gratitude is.”
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Churchill confidently assumed that that gratitude would carry him and his party over the threshold in the coming July election. John Colville had returned to England after active service with the RAF. He visited his old boss on Whitsunday, May 20, and found that “the PM can’t get the political prospect out of his head and all day the conversation was on [the] coming election.”
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Churchill also believed that victory in that election would absolve him for any failure to reach a political settlement in India. That was why Churchill had been so willing to agree to Wavell’s summit conference proposal, as he told the viceroy himself later.
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Other members of the India Committee had assured him that no agreement
was
possible. Offering the impossible proposal, Churchill believed, would conclude the matter, at least until the war was over—or even perhaps for good.

On May 2 the British Fourteenth Army entered Rangoon. Almost 70 percent of its soldiers were nonwhites, Indians or Gurkhas or Burmese or Africans.
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Their pre-monsoon offensive had been faster and more devastating than Hitler’s vaunted Blitzkrieg into France in 1940. Novelist John Masters, serving as major with a Gurkha regiment in the Seventeenth Indian Division, watched them advance. “The dust thickened under the trees lining the road” to Rangoon, he later wrote, “until the column was motoring into a thunderous yellow tunnel, first the tanks, infantry all over them, then trucks filled with men,” Gurkhas and Punjabis, Kachins and Burmese, Hindus and Muslims, “a dozen religions, a score of languages passed in those trucks and tanks.” Masters himself was of mixed English and Indian parentage, as William Shepherd had been.

Masters thought to himself: “This was the old Indian Army going down to the attack, for the last time in history, exactly two hundred and fifty years after the Honorable East India Company enlisted its first ten sepoys on the Coromandel Coast.” The difference was that these soldiers were soon to be part of a new future, not returning to an imperial past.
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A month later Mountbatten staged an elaborate victory parade through Rangoon, a final display of British triumph in the colony that Randolph Churchill had made part of the empire.

But the old order was already dying. Plans were under way to grant Burma Dominion status, even though when and to whom were still unclear. It was precisely the situation that Wavell was hoping he could resolve in India, when he called Muhammad Jinnah, Abul Kalam Azad, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, G. S. Motilal, and eighteen other delegates to assemble at the Viceregal Lodge in Simla on June 25.

At the last minute Gandhi agreed to go. When he appeared in Simla, crowds flocked to get a glimpse of him. On the train up, thousands stood along every station cheering wildly as his train, the Frontier Mail, roared past.
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It was Wavell’s first meeting with the Mahatma, and he was deeply curious about him. On June 24 they spoke after lunch for nearly two hours.
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Wavell found him pleasant and “friendly for the time being” but also “rather vague and discursive.” Wavell wanted the delegates at Simla “to pull together for the sake of India and not in a party spirit,” and Gandhi agreed.
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“Mr. Gandhi then made a long, torturous, and prolix statement” that lasted more than an hour, Wavell remembered. It covered the history of the Indian National Congress as well as the British in India, the British character, and “the qualities of a good soldier.” Gandhi reminisced about carrying the wounded General Woodgate down from Spion Kop in 1900, and he expressed regret that he was not permitted to address the Indian Army and that its soldiers had had to come to see him “in mufti and at night.”

The army was clearly much on Gandhi’s mind, but Wavell stressed that it was important to keep that body nonpolitical. He said they had a commander in chief whom they fully trusted (General Auchinleck) and “that their reputation never stood higher.” Wavell wanted to keep it that way. Gandhi again assented.

On one point, however, Wavell could not move him. Gandhi had said he felt it was a bad idea for him to attend the conference, but if Wavell wished him to, he would come “and sit in a corner.” But he would represent “nobody except himself.” All negotiations he would leave in the hands of the Congress president, Dr. Azad.

That was a mistake, as Jinnah immediately realized when he heard the news.
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Azad was a hardworking and loyal Gandhi follower. But in a crucial meeting like this he was in over his head. Azad and fellow Congress members hoped they could make headway, and they were pleased that Wavell was willing to work with them and let bygones be bygones about Quit India. But assigning a Muslim to speak for the Congress, as if to prove its shopworn contention that it spoke for all India, could not have been more calculated to arouse Jinnah’s suspicion and ire.

His position on partition remained unchanged, and in four years he never suggested otherwise. But if there was going to be a new executive council, he insisted, it could have no Muslim members who were not also members of the Muslim League. Wavell could not agree to that demand without infuriating the Congress, and so after three weeks of fruitless discussion, the Simla conference ended—like so many others—a signal failure.

Wavell blamed himself for the breakdown. “Whether I have done more good or harm by trying,” he wrote in his journal, “only time will show.”
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Gandhi took the news of the conference failure “calmly.” Like Churchill, he had expected little else. Afterward he sent a gracious note to Wavell: “You have taken the blame [for Simla’s failure] on your own shoulders. But the world will think otherwise. India certainly does.” He agreed that some would say that the London government was reluctant to pass power “into the hands of their erstwhile prisoners.” But “what a pity that the moral height which the British, if not even the Allied Powers, would have occupied by the success of this conference” was not to be.
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Gandhi boarded his train with serene resignation. To his mind, the Simla conference would be his last performance on the political stage. Its failure confirmed what he had always believed: the futility of constitutional debates. He withdrew to Poona to begin work on his latest brainchild, a nature-cure clinic for the poor.

The conference had a strange postscript—or rather, prescript. On June 15, just before he left for Simla, Gandhi had released to the press the text of a letter he had written to Winston Churchill nearly a year earlier, on July 17, 1944.

It had been written when Gandhi’s spirits were at their lowest, and it read:

Dear Prime Minister,

You are reported to have a desire to crush the simple “Naked Fakir” as you are said to have described me. I have been long trying to be a Fakir and that naked—a more difficult task. I therefore regard the expression as a compliment, however unintended. I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.