Gandhi Before India (60 page)

The echoes of the Sodha case reached London, where the Colonial Office received a petition of protest from the All India Muslim League. Gandhi was said to have rescued Mrs Sodha and her children from ‘a state of destitution’. Her prosecution was thus ‘particularly harsh, if not actually cruel’. Sent this petition by London, the Transvaal Ministers answered that Gandhi had crossed the border with Mrs Sodha ‘with the deliberate purpose of embarrassing the Government’. In view of the fact that ‘many thousands of pounds sterling have recently been collected in India and elsewhere by the emissaries of the Transvaal British Indian Association in support of resistance to the laws and the Government,’ said the Ministers, ‘it is difficult to understand why Mrs Sodha should be in the destitute condition alleged, or why the cost of her removal from Johannesburg should have been undertaken unless there existed an ulterior motive.’
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The claims were in conflict, but not, in fact, irreconcilable. Gandhi may have had both objectives in mind. By providing succour to the Sodha family, he was issuing a fresh challenge to the authorities as well.

In the first weeks of 1911, the government gazette printed a proposed new Immigration Bill. This would repeal the existing legislation, but did not explicitly protect the wives and children of domiciled Asiatics. It specified a language test for new entrants to the Transvaal, but was ambiguous about whether Indians who passed the test would be allowed in. Polak wrote to Gokhale that the last clause was crucial; on its interpretation would depend the Indians’ response. ‘Gandhi is fairly optimistic,’ he remarked. ‘I am not so satisfied.’
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Gandhi asked a senior European lawyer in Johannesburg to analyse the bill on his behalf. He also wrote to the Minister of the Interior, who answered that, yes, educated Asiatics admitted under the new bill would
not be made to register. Gandhi now said that if the Government clarified the position of women and children, he would ‘advise the community in the Transvaal to send a formal acquiescence [to the bill], and passive resistance will then naturally end.’
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On 3 March, Gandhi wrote to Maganlal that ‘it appears that the struggle will definitely come to an end.’ In that case, most Indians would leave Tolstoy Farm, but Gandhi and Kasturba, and their sons, would stay on. ‘How can I leave Mr Kallenbach immediately after the struggle is over?’ he said. His friend had spent £600 on the building, and Gandhi and his sons would try ‘and make good as much of the loss as possible by physical labour’.

Preoccupied with the negotiations, Gandhi had neglected Kasturba. She was suffering from bleeding and acute pain, and may have been passing through menopause. One day Gandhi found her in tears. He joked that if she died, there was plenty of wood on the Farm to cremate her. That got her laughing, and ‘half the pain disappeared with the laugh’. Thereafter the two of them decided to go on a salt-free diet, and her health improved. ‘The bleeding stopped immediately,’ he told Maganlal.
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Gandhi could now return to the negotiations, which had turned difficult again. As the Immigration Bill passed through its second and third reading, General Smuts met with stiff opposition from MPs belonging to the Orange Free State. Any law now framed had to be relevant to the Union as a whole. But the Free Staters insisted that whatever the concessions in other provinces, no Asians would be permitted to enter their territory. Gandhi sent Smuts’ secretary a series of telegrams in protest. They were not concerned, he said, with ‘individual material gain’, or with ‘whether a single Asiatic actually enters [the] Free State’, but they must, on a matter of principle, oppose a racial bar in any legislation intended to replace the Transvaal laws against which their struggle had been aimed. He pointed out that the ‘absence of any substantial Indian population’ in the Free State ‘effectively bar [the] entrance of educated Indians’. However, if the Union Parliament ratified the Free State policy, they were then ‘saying to the world [that] no Indian even though a potentate can legally enter and reside in a Province of the Union’.

Smuts replied that this was an ‘absolutely new contention’ on the part of the Indians, which would ‘exasperate the European community
and complicate the position even further’. Glossing this letter to Joseph Doke, Gandhi said that the General’s remark ‘reminds me of what the demonstrators did to inflame the crowd in the December of 1896 and the January of 1897. The European community is certainly not exasperated, but General Smuts is, and he wants to impart his own exasperation to the community.’
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Gandhi was not far wrong. In a conversation with the Governor-General’s Private Secretary, Smuts outlined his views on the question. ‘If South Africa were to be a white man’s country,’ said the General, then more Europeans had to be brought in. At present white immigration was mostly Jewish. Jews (in his view) were ‘apt to take up activities of a parasitical nature’; ‘although ethnically and socially they remained a distinct entity’, they were at least white. Smuts was ‘not prepared to face the alternative of the whole retail trade of the country falling into Asiatic hands. As between the two evils of the undesirable business methods of white traders on the one hand and the unlimited extension of Asiatic trading on the other, he did not hesitate to choose the former.’
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Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, Louis Botha, had received a petition asking that all Asiatics be deported from South Africa. Botha answered that he would personally like the Indians to be sent away, but operating as they did under the British flag they had to be more careful. The matter continued to vex his Government; as he joked in a speech to his constituents, ‘General Smuts had wasted away to a shadow (laughter) when as a result of his incessant efforts to settle the question, the gaols were filled.’
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L. W. Ritch was now in Cape Town, from where he sent a report on the mood in the Union Parliament. ‘The feeling against the admission of any more of our people is overwhelming,’ he remarked:

There was only one chorus [in Parliament]. Different representatives of different interests opposed the Bill because it appeared to threaten the particular interests of their class, but there was undoubted unanimity about exclusion. We have, I think, been wise to restrict our demands to existing rights of persons already domiciled.
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The last sentence is crucial – it differentiated the position of Gandhi and company from radicals who wished there to be no bar to immigration at all. Among these radicals was P. S. Aiyar, the Durban journalist and editor of the Tamil-oriented
African Chronicle
, who by now had begun
to move away from the incremental moderation of Gandhi. In March 1911, Aiyar complained to Gokhale that ‘Gandhi and Polak do not wish to press forward our claims for freedom of movement throughout the Union.’ If provincial barriers were not removed, argued Aiyar, then ‘the last four years of terrific suffering and the great sacrifice made by our Motherland towards their cause would result in no practical material benefits’.
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Aiyar’s proposal implied a wholesale redistribution of the Indian population throughout South Africa. But would the white residents (and rulers) of Transvaal, the Cape and the Free State have permitted thousands of Indian traders and craftsmen from Natal to come to their states seeking ‘practical material benefits’? Gandhi understood the impossibility of such a demand and hence set his sights lower, on securing the rights of individuals and their families in the provinces
in which they already lived
, and on opening the door for a small, incremental immigration of a few educated Indians a year. However, the extreme demands of the radicals prejudiced even the modest claims of the moderates. ‘Asiatic demands,’ wrote an influential white paper in Johannesburg, ‘often display a tendency to grow bigger whenever any part of them is conceded.’ This was ‘one of the dangers of the new policy. There is no finality about it. Once you begin to allow a certain number to enter, you invite an application for increasing the number.’ The paper was in ‘no doubt [that] if the figure was fixed at one hundred and twenty tomorrow, they would be asking for twelve hundred next week.’
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Gandhi and Polak were actually asking only for six new entrants a year. Even this many MPs were unwilling to concede. Seeking to break the deadlock, Gandhi met General Smuts in Cape Town on 27 March, and immediately afterwards set down a record of the meeting. It opened with the General saying that to ask for (theoretical) entry to the Free State was both ‘very unreasonable’ and ‘absolutely new’. Gandhi said what existed was a racial bar, and they had always opposed that. As he put it, ‘the combined effect of the Free State Law and the New Bill will be to shut out the Nizam of Hyderabad [the richest Indian potentate], and I assure you the passive resisters will fight against it.’ Smuts answered that ‘the Free Staters will never consent’ to the change proposed by the Indians. Gandhi responded that ‘it is your duty to persuade them’. Smuts said that he would talk again to Free State MPs.

As the meeting came to a close, Smuts asked Gandhi what he was
doing in Johannesburg. Gandhi answered that he was looking after the families of passive resisters. Smuts said that ‘it has hurt me more than you to imprison these people. It has been the unpleasantest episode of my life to imprison men who suffer for their conscience.’ To this Gandhi riposted, ‘And yet you are persecuting Mrs. Sodha.’ The notes end here, with the note-writer having the last word. There does not appear to be another version in the Smuts papers.
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In April 1911, Gandhi went again to Cape Town. This time he stayed four weeks, furiously lobbying MPs to make the changes he desired in the Immigration Law. In the absence of Sonja Schlesin – who had stayed behind in Johannesburg to keep the office going – Gandhi had to type his correspondence himself. And there was plenty of this: letters seeking appointments, letters seeking clarifications, letters stating his own point of view. His fingers were so tired that he used his left hand to write to his family.

In Cape Town, Gandhi met MPs of different parties and provinces. Two weeks into his stay, General Smuts granted him a further appointment. They met at 11.30 a.m. on 19 April, and spoke for forty minutes. Once more, Gandhi wrote down, by hand, his recollections of the meeting. Smuts said the Free Staters were still opposed to admitting Asiatics. He could defeat them in the Assembly but not in the Senate, so thought it best to postpone the bill to the next session of Parliament. Meanwhile, he wanted Gandhi to withdraw his agitation. ‘I want time,’ said the General. ‘I shall yet beat the Free Staters. But you should not be aggressive.’

In the course of the conversation, Smuts said that ‘this country is the Kaffirs’. We whites are a handful. We do not want Asia to come in.’ Then he paused, and continued: ‘I do not know how your people spread. They go everywhere. I have now more petitions against [Indian] dealers. My difficulty of the future will be regarding them.’ He then changed the subject, and the following conversation ensued:

The same evening, Gandhi wrote to Smuts confirming that, to use

military terms, our conversation implies a truce for a year or longer, i.e., until the Parliament meets again … I am sincerely anxious to help you, but I do not know how I could promise inactivity on the part of the passive resisters. What you, the Imperial Government and I want to avoid is the ferment. I fear that, in the nature of things, it is well nigh impossible to avoid it if the matter is not closed during this season.

Gandhi was suggesting that he did not have full control over his sometimes militant followers. By way of calming tempers, he asked Smuts to make three assurances: that in the next session the existing legislation would be repealed, that passive resisters who had the right do so could now freely register in Transvaal, and that, pending legislation, up to six educated passive resisters in Transvaal would be allowed to remain as ‘educated immigrants’. If this were done, he did ‘not anticipate any difficulty in persuading my countrymen to suspend passive resistance’.

The General’s secretary wrote back, agreeing to these conditions, and conveying Smuts’ hope that this temporary settlement ‘will leave all concerned free to devote their energies to securing a more lasting one’.

On 24 April, with the truce in place, Gandhi left Cape Town to return to Johannesburg. On the way back, he remembered that he had forgotten one crucial concession. The provisional settlement envisaged the release from prison of all passive resisters. But he had omitted to specify that these should be Chinese as well as Indian. He rang up Smuts’ secretary, E. F. C. Lane, to make this clear, and then set it down in writing. ‘There are now,’ he said, ‘more Chinese than Indian passive resisters in
gaol. I am quite sure that General Smuts will not expect Indian passive resisters to desert their Chinese fellow sufferers. They naturally ask for the same protection for the Chinese passive resisters as for themselves’ – namely, that they be released from jail, be allowed to voluntarily register, and to secure their own rights of domicile and livelihood in Transvaal. With Leung Quinn away in India, Gandhi had taken it upon himself to represent the interests of the Chinese, too.
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