Gandhi & Churchill (96 page)

Wavell returned to India, where the news of Churchill’s fall was greeted less with joy than with uneasy foreboding about what would happen next.

“I was shocked,” Nirad Chaudhuri confessed years later. He could not believe the British people would throw out the man “who had led them to victory from so hopeless a situation.” He felt it did not bode well, not for Britain or for India. Churchill had been “the most hated man in India,” but he had symbolized the strength and resolution of the Raj, a force for British domination but also for civil order in times of crisis. By throwing Churchill out, the British had surrendered their last claim to respect as well as power. “The Indian people knew that so far as they were concerned they had men of straw to deal with,” albeit accommodating ones. Chaudhuri and others realized that when the next crisis came, Indians would be on their own, for better or worse.
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Gandhi saw Churchill’s defeat as nothing less than a miracle. “To me it is a sufficient miracle,” he said, “that in spite of his oratory and brilliance, Churchill should cease to be the idol of the British people who til yesterday hung on his lips and listened to him in awe.” The election had bolstered his faith in God, Gandhi told a British interviewer.
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But otherwise his reaction was muted. Since Simla he had been retiring into himself more and more and taking his leave of politics. He told the press he was deferring all matters regarding India’s future to the members of the Working Committee, including Nehru, the Congress’s new president.

He did tell the committee that Churchill’s election loss “in spite of his unique victories and achievements” was a warning of what could happen when politicians “ceased to reflect the nation’s mind.”
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But then Gandhi told reporters it was no good asking him about Indian politics because “my advice, independently given, may be in conflict with their opinion” and only “confuse the public mind.”
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He preferred to pour his remaining energies into his Constructive Program, meaning pushing the use of khadi and the spinning wheel and working with India’s sixty million untouchables.

The untouchables were part of the ineluctable reality that was India. Gandhi’s term for them,
Harijans
or Children of God, had never caught on. Wavell and other officials despaired of their future if the British left. Churchill had invoked their welfare as an argument for staying in India. Their chief spokesman, Dr. Ambedkar, believed that only built-in constitutional safeguards could save them from oblivion in a Hindu majority state. But Gandhi still believed that moral purity, not legislation, was the true path to achieving Harijan freedom and redemption. At one point he even resolved to live among untouchables in order to be a living example for other Hindus and to bring his Constructive Program to the very lowest rungs of Indian society.

Indeed, on August 14, the very day Japan surrendered, Gandhi was more concerned about his ongoing clash with Dr. Ambedkar, who was now on the viceroy’s council. “He wants to destroy Hinduism” was Gandhi’s complaint. He hoped the so-called Depressed Classes would abandon their self-declared leader and embrace the Congress instead—even though Gandhi was the only Congress figure who ever expressed any interest in their welfare.
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Japan’s surrender prompted no remark from Gandhi. He made no acknowledgment that the most destructive war in Asia’s history was over, or that India had played a vital role in it. Even the atom bomb, which so impressed Nehru, seemed to Gandhi only one more symptom of the West’s sick worship of technology and one more reason for India to remain on its path of spiritual truth. “If India wants to survive in a world of atom bombs,” he later told an audience, “she must be disciplined and united first, and untouchability and caste distinctions must go.”
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October 2, 1945, marked Gandhi’s seventy-sixth birthday. To his mind, he was entering the last stage of his life. He liked to say, “God has tied me with a cotton thread,” quoting a Mirabai poem. “Whichever way he pulls, I am His.”
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But then as always, events pulled him back into the political arena with a jolt.

The first event was Wavell’s announcement on September 18 over Indian radio of the new Labour government’s plans for India. In the wake of new elections, he would meet with members of the provincial legislative assemblies to discuss independence and a future constitution. He would form a new executive council out of India’s leading political parties, including Congress and the Muslim League. Wavell’s announcement had “a favorable reception” in Indian political circles. He hoped that Congress realists like Vallabhbhai Patel would use the new atmosphere of goodwill to guide India to a peaceful transition of power. Reflecting the new mood, Nehru looked forward to Britain quietly leaving India within two to five years.
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But then Wavell and the Indian government made a major, even a fatal, mistake. In November the trial of former members of Bose’s Indian National Army opened at the Red Fort in Delhi. Bose himself had died in an air crash, while trying to flee Japan for Russia after the war.
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His hapless followers had been caught up in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender. Some twenty thousand of them were technically army deserters. Wavell knew retaliation would be risky, but Indian Army Commander in Chief Auchinleck fiercely argued that if they did not at least try former INA officers for their crimes (including murdering Indian POWs), it would cripple army discipline.

The first trial opened in Delhi in the full glare of national publicity on November 2. Wavell and Auchinleck had anticipated trouble, but what they got was a national tidal wave of anger and outrage. When Gandhi heard rumors about the trial in July, he at first refused to believe the British could be so vindictive—or so short-sighted. He urged the Congress to use its own funds to find the INA men defense lawyers. Indeed, since the first three defendants were a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh, the Muslim League, the Congress, and Sikh political parties all scrambled to their defense. Even the aging Liberal stalwart T. B. Sapru joined the defense committee, standing shoulder to shoulder with Nehru. The trial boiled everything down to “the old contest, England v. India.”
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Even the choice of the Red Fort as the trial site was a blunder. This was where the last Mughal emperor had been tried in 1858 at the end of the Great Mutiny—or what more and more Indian nationalists were calling the War of Indian Independence. The setting made the defendants as much a symbol of Indian identity as anything that had happened since the Salt March. As INA prisoners were moved by train to Delhi, crowds gathered at the tracks to cheer and wave pictures of “Netaji” Bose, much as they once had done of Gandhi.
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All at once, Bose’s INA proved to be a more powerful force in defeat than it had ever been on the battlefield.

Anti-British demonstrations broke out around the country, much larger than any in the Quit India campaign. Every political party and all shades of political opinion joined in. In Calcutta members of Bose’s old Forward Bloc, Communist students, and Congress radicals combined forces to organize scenes reminiscent of the French Revolution, with huge street demonstrations under enormous banners and speeches praising the INA men as martyrs and heroes.
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In Calcutta protesters clashed with police. More than thirty people were killed and several hundred injured, while cars and police vehicles were overturned and set on fire across the city. When the viceroy held the official V-J Day parade in Delhi, rioters burned down Delhi’s town hall, and the police opened fire, killing many.
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By then the court had added fuel to the firestorm by acquitting two of the three INA officers. The verdict made the whole proceeding look like pure vindictive spite.

Gandhi was sympathetic but aloof and as usual condemned the violence. Ironically, the one Indian mass protest movement that he did
not
start did the most long-lasting damage to British rule, including to the Indian Army. Even the KCIOs, the bedrock of the officer corps, split on the issue, while the Indian Air Force was “100 percent” in support of the INA defendants. Then in February 1946 the Indian Navy erupted into full-scale mutiny in Bombay and Karachi. Fresh outbreaks of urban violence followed. In Calcutta police stations, post offices, and the YMCA were set on fire. Even Indians wearing Western dress found themselves under attack. In Bombay crowds smashed shops, police
chowkis,
and twelve hundred streetlamps.
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By the twenty-fifth the violence had spread to Madras.

Wavell realized the situation was spinning out of control. “Every day that passes now brings more and more well-disposed Indians into the anti-British camp,” the governor of the Northwest Frontier province wrote. “I dislike saying this intensely,” he added, but “the best thing to do is to cut our losses” and stop the trials. Wavell finally had to agree, and by May the prosecution of former INA soldiers ceased. However, Royal Navy ships still had to be sent in to suppress the mutinies in Bombay and Karachi. More than two hundred civilians died in riots in Bombay and another thousand were injured.
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Very suddenly the whole dynamic of British-Indian relations had changed. As 1946 dawned, the Indian street controlled the pace of events, and militancy was the order of the day. British rule had shed its last shred of credibility, even among the British. For a decade and a half the British had held a long, careful debate and deliberation about India’s future once the Raj ended. Tens of thousands of pages of government reports and White Papers and Blue Books had been issued, more than for any political issue since Irish Home Rule.
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Now the British began looking for the closest exit. A stampede seemed to be gathering, not just among British officials and Britons in India but among Indians themselves. With the Red Fort trials, lightning had struck close to an already nervous herd. No one panicked, but everyone began edging away from the danger.

In an uneasy London the response was to dispatch a new Cripps delegation to work out final details on an offer of independence. The so-called Cabinet Mission arrived in March 1946. The question was no longer whether the British were pulling out of India, as in the 1930s, or when or under what conditions, as during the war. Now the question was how soon the British could hand over everything, including the administration and army, to someone else—
anyone
else. It was the victory Indian nationalists, among them Gandhi, had dreamed of. But at the same time the various political parties and personalities realized an important albeit ugly truth. The battle against the British was over, but the battle over who would succeed them was about to begin.

The two principal protagonists were now Nehru and Jinnah. Each headed a large, but by no means monolithic, political movement. They deeply despised each other; neither believed the other was capable of acting in good faith. Nehru assumed that the end of the war and Churchill’s political demise had made the creation of a Pakistan unnecessary. He had always believed the Muslim League was an artificial creation of the British, as part of a divide-and-rule policy. When the British left, the majority of Muslims would surely come flocking back to the Congress. “We will all march together and ask for independence together,” he said confidently in January. “There will be a united India and there will be no problem at all.”
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For his part, Jinnah called Nehru “Peter Pan,” the boy who had never grown up. He saw Nehru’s program as simply a blind for establishing a Hindu majority dictatorship.
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Viceroy Wavell correctly saw his job, and the job of the British, as getting these two contentious personalities to agree on a final settlement. To his disgust, however, the Cabinet Mission insisted on meeting with Gandhi instead. They still believed the international public relations image of Gandhi as India’s leader and national savior, the man who could somehow perform magic and unite 350 million people around his charismatic presence.

Wavell knew better. He had met with Gandhi after the Calcutta riots in mid-December 1945. He knew Gandhi was still mentally sharp and in surprisingly good health for a man of seventy-six who had abused his body through fasts, food fads, and overwork, and who was still bitter over what he saw as British intransigence and broken promises. But the grand old man of Indian politics was now detached from events and impotent to affect them. Nonetheless, Wavell agreed to let the Cabinet Mission meet with Gandhi one more time.

The meeting on April 3 fulfilled Wavell’s worst expectations. Gandhi arrived wearing nothing but his customary dhoti and greeted Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence, and First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander with his usual evasive humility. When Gandhi asked for a glass of water, the secretary of state ran to fetch it himself, instead of sending a servant. When Pethick-Lawrence failed to return, Cripps bounded up and ran out the door, as if he and the state secretary were waiters trying to please a demanding guest rather than representatives of a ruling power.

“I was frankly horrified,” Wavell wrote in his journal, and more horrified by Gandhi’s proposals. They included release of all detainees, meaning the INA prisoners, abolition of the salt tax (still a sore spot for Gandhi after fifteen years), and dismissal of Dr. Ambedkar from the viceroy’s executive council. At the same time Gandhi floored everyone by proposing that Jinnah be made prime minister of India, although he also insisted that Jinnah would have to answer to the Hindu majority in the Central Assembly.

“As usual, G. refused to be pinned down to details,” Wavell noted. This was what came, the viceroy thought to himself, “of all this slopping good-will all over the place.” Then to Wavell’s further horror, Pethick-Lawrence closed the meeting with a long rambling speech that expressed “penitence” for British rule. Wavell thought it sent precisely the wrong message, just as meeting with Gandhi was precisely the wrong approach to constitution-making.
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