Gandhi & Churchill (97 page)

When Gandhi left, Wavell and the Labour delegation finally settled down to business. In the growing Delhi heat, they met with virtually every Indian leader who had a national following, including Ambedkar (“sincere, honest, and courageous, but an unattractive personality,” Wavell admitted) and leading Sikhs.
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At the end of two months of complex negotiations they arrived at a plan. Dominion India would finally get its independence, but in a strange and complicated three-tier system. At the top would be the Union of India, forged from British India and the princely states, with overarching power to run foreign affairs, defense, and communications. Below them, individual provinces and princely states would run their own affairs.

Sandwiched in between would be three new regional blocs in the Constituent Assembly. Section A would comprise Muslim-majority Baluchistan, the Sind, the Punjab, and the Northwest Frontier. Section B would contain the six Hindu-majority central and south India provinces. Finally Bengal and Assam, where the Hindu-Muslim split was most contentious, would form Section C. Each of these blocs would hold veto power over legislation emanating from the top, forcing the central government to recognize regional and sectional interests, especially where Muslim and Hindu interests clashed.
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The Cabinet Mission hoped that this plan would give Indians the best of both worlds. Hindus and Congress would get their united India, while Muslims would get recognition of their minority status and the power to veto moves they considered threatening. And the provinces and princely states would be free to run their own affairs with minimal interference from above.

Historians, especially Indian historians, have often cast Muhammad Jinnah as the great wrecker of Indian unity. But it is worth noting that he and the Muslim League formally agreed to the Cabinet plan on June 6, even though it made no provision for Jinnah’s greatest dream, an independent Pakistan.
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The Congress balked at full endorsement but did agree to join an interim government in which it and the Muslim League would share key cabinet posts. Nehru opposed making any concession to Jinnah, but the majority of Congress were more realistic. They were willing to accept a half, or more precisely a three-quarters loaf, if it meant an end to British rule and an end to communal strife. With the League and Congress for once in agreement, India’s other political parties were prepared to grumble but not back out. By the evening of June 19, 1946, the second Cripps mission seemed to have achieved the impossible, reaching a deal not only for a future constitution but for a fourteen-man interim Indian government.

It was Gandhi, and Gandhi alone, who wrecked everything.

He had learned about the three-tier arrangement on May 16 and soon reduced it to ruins. Its complicated house-of-cards architecture seemed to sum up everything he despised about constitution-making and politics. So he pretended it was not a formal plan at all but “an appeal and an advice” that a future constituent assembly could alter at will. He said individual provinces should be free to opt out of the regional blocs at the outset—which meant the three groupings would actually have no power at all. Other than that, he said, “it is the best document the British Government could have produced in the circumstances.” But he predicted that the Congress, and the Indian people, would have nothing to do with it. In the end, Gandhi told Cripps, “you will have to choose between the two—the Moslem League or Congress, both your creations,” he added sarcastically.
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Gandhi refused to endorse any British plan that gave the two organizations equal constitutional footing. So following his wishes, the Congress refused its endorsement as well.

Wavell still had time, however, to organize an interim government. On June 19 he believed they had reached agreement on fourteen people to assume office. Then on the twentieth “the situation seems to have gone haywire again, thanks to Gandhi.”
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At the last minute Rajagopalachari told the viceroy that, at Gandhi’s insistence, the Parsi named to the interim council was not acceptable and that the Muslim contingent would have to include Dr. Azad, a Congress member. Wavell realized at once that this change would prompt Jinnah’s refusal and doom the deal.

Cripps met with Gandhi for nearly three-quarters of an hour to try to persuade him to change his mind. Gandhi absolutely refused to budge. After almost three months of negotiation in sweltering heat, the deal was dead. Cripps and his fellow cabinet members went home, disappointed and baffled.

Wavell was filled with rage and disgust at the Mahatma. “Gandhi ran true to form and was the real wrecker,” he wrote bitterly in his final summary of the mission on July 1. “I am depressed at the future prospect.” But he still found room for some rough humor and penned a few lines parodying Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:

Beware the Gandhiji, my son,

the satyagraha, the bogy-fast…

The Gandhiji, on wrecking bent,

Came trippling down the bangi ways,

And woffled as he went.
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Why had Gandhi been so intransigent? His many statements to the press at the time were evasive, if not deliberately misleading. Allowing Jinnah to exclude Azad would certainly have reinforced the Muslim League’s claim to speak for all Muslims, a principle Gandhi had never accepted—it had led to a breach between the two men before. But Gandhi’s intransigence also marked the beginning of a breach with his closest colleagues, including Rajaji and Patel. It rested on his belief that no British-made constitution could work, or should be allowed to work. It was up to Indians, he believed, to discover the key to their own self-rule, to Swaraj in a proper sense, whatever the risks might be.

In these years his secretary Pyarelal was closer to Gandhi than virtually anyone. But even he was startled by Gandhi’s fierce “readiness to face chaos and anarchy in preference to peace imposed by British arms” or even by British methods. Gandhi had convinced himself that only he could “settle directly with the Moslem League after the British had quitted, even if it meant civil war.”
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The apostle of nonviolence had said more than once that he preferred anarchy to slavery; his sabotaging of the Cabinet Mission plan was about to fulfill that wish.

Many individuals and institutions would be responsible for the tragedy that followed in the next year and a half. The Raj heads the list, for its unwillingness to face the reality of Indian independence until it was too late. Politicians like Nehru and Jinnah bear the blame for their willingness to tear India apart unless they got the power they wanted. The Attlee government and the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, let it all happen.

Winston Churchill also shares the blame.
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For more than a decade he had fought to delay the inevitable transfer of power, sowing distrust and allowing bitter resentments to fester. If the 1935 India Bill had passed three or even two years earlier, or if Churchill had offered postwar independence in 1940 instead of in 1942, India might have had breathing space to work out a suitable framework for either a unified constitution or a peaceful India-Pakistan split. Instead, Churchill gambled that delay would force the British people to rise to the challenge of once again being an imperial power, and compel Indians to sink back under their customary fate as a subordinate “Asiatic race.” Churchill lost his gamble. Millions of India’s poorest and most vulnerable—the very people whose welfare Churchill said was his primary concern and the Raj’s mandate for rule—paid the price.

However, the other person who must bear blame is Gandhi. For the sake of an unrealizable ideal, he had undermined the last chance at a peaceful settlement to India’s freedom. Indeed, Gandhi’s responsibility may run even deeper. His decade and a half of defiance of the law through civil disobedience had bred an atmosphere of contempt for social order, a celebration of recklessness and militancy. This contempt had horrified Liberals like T. B. Sapru in 1930, but by 1946 it had sunk deep into the Indian consciousness. The sad paradox was that the apostle of nonviolence had consistently, if unintentionally, inspired violence by others.
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His fasts became potent weapons not because of his moral stature but because of fear that his death would set off riots across India. It was violence, not nonviolence, that forced the British first to change course, then to seek Gandhi’s approval, and then finally to leave India. However, by encouraging others to see themselves in his exalted image, Gandhi helped to spread the dangerous fiction that all street action was soul force and vice versa.

The first horrific indication of this came six weeks later. Jinnah was the first to take a page from Gandhi’s book. He believed that the collapse of the Cabinet Mission proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only solution of Indian’s problem is Pakistan.” He told the Muslim League Council when they met in Bombay, “I feel we have exhausted all reasons…There is no tribunal to which we can go.” The Muslim League had won majorities in key provinces in the recent elections; but Jinnah saw no reward in joining Wavell’s interim government. Instead, the Quaid-e-Azam and the council declared August 16 a day of “direct action to achieve Pakistan and to organize the Moslems for the coming struggle.”
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Jinnah had envisioned the Day of Action as a series of Congress-style protests, boycotts, and hartals. Instead, August 16 set off three days of massacres in Calcutta, where Muslim and Hindu mobs clashed in a bloodbath. More than 5,000 were murdered and another 15,000 were injured, while 100,000 were made homeless, the majority of them Muslims. Four battalions of British troops spent days carrying away the mutilated bodies, many of them women and children.

What Churchill had warned would happen if the British left seemed to have already started. A few people tried to stop the slaughter. A friend of Nirad Chaudhuri was saved by his Muslim neighbors from a mob that besieged his house. But Chaudhuri’s brother could not prevent the murder of an elderly Muslim fruit-seller in the Bhowanipore district, who was dragged away even as he pleaded for his life. Bloodlust infused people of all ages and education levels, across religious lines. Calcutta’s Sikh population contributed some of the coldest stone killers. One man saw a Muslim boy of fourteen caught by a Hindu mob, stripped naked to see if he was circumcised, then thrown into a pond and forced under water with bamboo poles; a well-known Bengali engineer with a British university degree used his Rolex wristwatch to note how long it took for the boy to drown.
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From far away in Delhi Wavell watched the death toll rise, helpless to do anything. On the evening of the eighteenth he begged Nehru to consider joining Jinnah in a coalition government, in order to quell the sectarian violence and restore order. But it was hopeless. Nehru needed the support of the ultra-orthodox Hindu Mahasabha in order to maintain his stature in the Congress; so no compromise with Muslims was possible. On the twentieth Wavell spoke to his deputy private secretary, who was normally upbeat about India’s future. “Our only course is to get out of India as soon as possible and leave her to her fate,” Ian Scott gloomily said, “which will be civil war.”
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Wavell, refusing to give in to despair, drew up a plan for a graduated British withdrawal in anticipation of a massive and violent Muslim-Hindu split. He journeyed to Calcutta himself to see the devastation, then returned to push Nehru into reassuring the Muslim League about the future before it was too late. On August 28 he even enlisted Gandhi in the effort, but that only made things worse. The discussion turned heated, until finally (according to Wavell) Gandhi thumped the table with his gnarled fist and said, “If India wants her bloodbath she shall have it.”

It was a stunning moment. Wavell said he was shocked to hear such language from the Mahatma.
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The following evening Gandhi wrote a highly revealing letter to Wavell. “I write this as a friend and after deep thought,” he said.

If British arms are kept here for internal peace and order your Interim Government would be reduced to farce. The Congress cannot afford to impose its will on warring elements in India through the use of British arms. Nor can the Congress be expected to bend itself and adopt what it considers a wrong course over the brutal exhibition recently witnessed in Bengal. Such submissions would itself lead to an encouragement and repetition of such tragedies…And all this will be chiefly due to the continued presence in India of a foreign power.

After reading it, Wavell thought, “It looked like a declaration of war.” But on September 2 he still swore in Jawaharlal Nehru as vice president of the new government. After taking his oath of office, Nehru muttered,
“Jai Hind”
under his breath, but Wavell pretended not to notice.
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In late October a formula was finally found to allow Jinnah to enter the government, but it was too late to stop the next major wave of violence of East Bengal, in the remote and lushly green district of Noakhali.

The massacres began on October 10. Muslim gangs murdered Hindus in every village through which they passed, slaughtering the men like animals and raping and killing the women, then throwing the bodies down the wells. Nearly fifty thousand terrified Hindu villagers, who had lived peacefully with their Muslim neighbors for centuries, fled for their lives to neighboring Bihar, where Hindus were a majority. (There Hindu gangs, learning of the horrors in Noakhali, began hunting down and killing Muslims in retaliation.) The district’s remoteness and junglelike terrain made restoring order by force almost impossible. It was five days before Gandhi learned what was happening.