Gandhi & Churchill (104 page)

Dr. Ambedkar was less charitable. When he heard the news, he was silent and then said, “My real enemy is gone; thank goodness the eclipse is over now.” If any man can be said to have truly hated Gandhi, it was the untouchable leader. Gandhi’s ideas he dismissed as a spurious brew of Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Rousseau: “There is always some simpleton to preach them.” Remembering their battle over the Communal Award in 1932, he considered Gandhi’s reputation as a saint to be a lie. “I’ve a feeling I know him better than most people,” he confided to a BBC television interviewer years later, “because he opened his fangs to me, you see, and I could see inside the man.”
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Gandhi’s other great opponent, Jinnah, only said, “He was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community,” and little else. Jinnah himself was dying of cancer; he would pass away on September 11, 1948, reduced to a skeleton weighing less than seventy pounds.
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Jawaharlal Nehru was supposed to see Gandhi that evening after the prayer meeting. Although Nehru and Gandhi had been at odds many times and foresaw India moving on different paths, he felt the assassination as a fierce personal blow. Mountbatten was shocked to see Nehru’s swollen, tear-stained face when he arrived at Birla House. “Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives,” Nehru said in a radio broadcast that evening, “and there is darkness everywhere.” Mountbatten wanted the body embalmed to preserve as a permanent memorial but finally relented to Gandhi’s wish to be cremated according to Hindu custom.

Manubehn and the other disciples gave Gandhi’s body its ritual purification bath, much as his mother had washed him when he was born. Some sang verses from the
Bhagavad Gita
. Others quietly wept.
^†136
The body was laid out for public viewing, a last
darshan,
with a garland of homespun cotton strands and a string of beads. Devadas insisted that his father’s chest be laid bare. “No soldier had a finer chest than Bapu’s,” he said proudly.
⁷¹

The funeral was delayed until noon so that Ramdas could fly in from Nagpur. The cortege extended over two miles, inching along from Birla House to the banks of the Jamnu River. The crowd numbered more than a million and a half people: “It was not so much a great sea of people as an immense glutinous mass clogging the arteries of the city, shapeless and diffuse.”
⁷²
A million more watched from roofs and housetops.

The cortege included the exalted—Nehru, Patel, Minister of Education Maulana Abul Kalam Azad—and the humble. It included Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, whites, and untouchables all walking together. The news of Gandhi’s death had stopped the violence around India like the throwing of a switch. What Gandhi had failed to achieve in life—the peace and unity of India—he managed to achieve in death: “Gandhi martyred proved even more powerful a bond for Indians than he had been alive.”
⁷³

Ironically, the vehicle that bore the great pacifist’s bier was an Indian Army truck, pulled by hand through the streets by two hundred men from the army, navy, and air force. Three air force C-47 Dakota cargo planes dumped hundreds of thousands of rose petals on the cortege as it reached the river. A small funeral pyre had been built along the bank, a brick platform two feet high and twelve feet square. Ramdas lit the pyre, which burned for fourteen hours. The crowd chanted
“Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”
as the Mahatma’s body was reduced to smoke and ash.

That night the smoldering remains had a final visitor. Gandhi’s eldest son Harilal, stricken by tuberculosis, returned to pay tribute to the father he never knew. Harilal spent that night at Devadas’s house.

He would die in a Bombay hospital less than five months later.
⁷⁴

Chapter Thirty-one

LION IN TWILIGHT

1948–1965

We have thrown away our glorious Empire, our wonderful Indian Empire.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, APRIL
1954

T
RIBUTES TO
G
ANDHI POURED IN
from every country. The pope, the Dalai Lama, President Harry Truman, Chiang Kai-shek, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and King George VI all spoke of his virtues and his legacy. Albert Einstein said that “in our time of utter moral decadence he was the only statesman to stand for a higher human relationship in the political sphere.” Even Douglas MacArthur felt it necessary to praise Gandhi’s greatness, as did American Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Novelist Pearl Buck called his assassination “another crucifixion.” Sir Stafford Cripps, more than anyone in the British cabinet, had shared Gandhi’s New Age outlook, despite constant disappointments at the hands of the Indians. “I know of no other man of any time or indeed of recent history,” Cripps wrote, “who so forcefully and convincingly demonstrated the power of spirit over material things.”
¹

There was one public man, however, who did not publish a tribute. Neither then nor later did Winston Churchill ever express any regret at the passing of his longtime rival for India and empire. For Churchill, Gandhi’s death was just one more killing in the slaughter that had been going on since 1946. “An awful tragedy has already occurred,” he told the House of Commons. “At least 400,000 men and women have slaughtered each other in the Punjab alone.” This was more, he pointed out, than all the losses of the British Empire in World War II.

“Many millions more are fugitives, wanderers, or exiles from their place of birth…We can only be thankful that no such catastrophe or anything which approached one twentieth part of its magnitude, fell upon the helpless Indian people during the long years they dwelt in peace and safety under the British Raj and Imperial Crown.”
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2

Churchill was in no mood to pay tribute to the man he still believed had triggered this enormous tragedy. Nor did he feel he had the time. Since assuming the role of leader of the opposition in Parliament, he found himself on the front line of yet another war, the Cold War.

“I am often asked, ‘Will there be war,’” he had told the House of Commons just the week before Gandhi’s death. “This is a question I have often asked myself.”
³
Less than a month later Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. In June the Soviets blockaded Berlin. These were events Churchill had predicted in his heralded speech on the “Iron Curtain” on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri. To Churchill’s mind, here was another war for civilization. Here was another summons to frustrate “the designs of wicked men.” That autumn of 1948 he sounded the first great call for European unity to repel the growing Soviet tide—a speech that in turn inspired the American Marshall Plan for European reconstruction.
⁴

This bout of furious activity shook him out of the mental depression that had swept over him after his defeat in July 1945. Churchill’s shock and chagrin at being rejected by the British people had been more profound than even his friends had realized. It had triggered one of his famous “black dog” moods, which his doctor Lord Moran diagnosed as melancholia.

These moods, so suggestive of a bipolar personality, came on without warning and could last for months. One had hit when Winston had been home secretary under Asquith, when very suddenly, as Churchill himself described it, “the light faded out of the picture.” He said it had led to days when he preferred not to stand too close to the rails of a train or the side of a ship as it passed through the water, moments when “a second’s action would end everything.”
⁵

A similar depression had struck in 1943, when it became clear he was losing Roosevelt’s trust and confidence and when his victory over Gandhi was proving to be only temporary. A third came in the aftermath of the 1945 election. One morning that August his doctor came to see him in an upper-story room at a London hotel. Churchill had airily waved a hand to indicate the balcony outside his window. “I don’t like sleeping near a precipice like that,” he declared. “I’ve no desire to quit the world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts come into the head.”
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Years later Churchill admitted that there had been one and only one bright spot in his defeat: he did not have to sit as prime minister in 1947 while India got its independence. For the man who had declared just five years before that “we mean to hold our own…and remain effective rulers in India for a long and indefinite period,” that would have been the supreme humiliation.
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At the time, however, Churchill resigned himself to the transfer of power. On May 21, 1947, he wrote his fateful letter to Prime Minister Attlee, pledging Conservative Party support for “Dominion Status for the several parts of a divided India.”
⁸
But the reality of partition annoyed him almost as much as it did Gandhi. Unifying India had been the one great achievement of the Raj, he always believed; the dissolution of the first seemed to underline the futility of the second. But Churchill chose not to fight the Attlee government over the empire’s crown jewel. Mountbatten had pledged to him that both India and Pakistan would become part of the commonwealth and would keep their ties to the British Crown as Dominions, a pledge that turned out to be false.

The one concession to pride that Churchill had asked for was that the final bill for Parliament be called “the India Bill” or “the India Self-Government Bill”—anything but “the India Independence Bill.” But Attlee had remained adamant.
⁹
A few months later Churchill realized that Mountbatten had betrayed him: both India and Pakistan threw off Dominion status as soon as they could; Pakistan even refused to join the commonwealth. Winston was also angry that Mountbatten had sent British-trained troops and RAF planes to support Nehru over Kashmir. “He accused me of having planned and organized the first victory of Hindustan (he refused to call it India) against Pakistan,” Mountbatten later confessed, and Churchill demanded that Mountbatten “not involve the King and my country in further backing traitors.”
¹⁰

Above all, Churchill was angry that Mountbatten had tried to hide the reality of the massacres from him and the government. Through General Ismay, however, Churchill learned the truth.
¹¹
As a result, his description of the death toll in House of Commons speeches in 1947 and 1948 was far more accurate than the sanitized version Mountbatten offered to the British public. Churchill chose to apply the word “holocaust” to what was happening in India, with good reason. Although he never publicly blamed his former protégé for what had happened, he gave vent to his feelings at a dinner party where his and the former viceroy and governor-general’s path crossed in 1951. Churchill said Mountbatten’s policy in India had needlessly cost more than a million lives. What Mountbatten had done, Churchill raged, had been a “lash across the face.” It would be years before they spoke again.
¹²

Churchill did speak out again on India in June 1948, five months after Gandhi’s death, when King George VI had to formally renounce his title as King-Emperor. “This melancholy event,” Winston said, “is only typical of what is happening to our Empire and Commonwealth in so many parts of the world.” That October, when the new Indian government was about to seize the last independent state, Hyderabad, by force, he repeated his warning of two years earlier that the end of British rule would mean only misery and bloodshed: “Alas I was not wrong…Blood, murder and disintegration ride triumphant over that unhappy land.”
¹³

However, he added with an air of finality, “Our Imperial mission in India is at an end—we must recognize that. Some day justice will be done by world opinion to our record there, but the chapter is closed and

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your tears blot out a word of it.”
¹⁴

By then Churchill could also sense another sign, besides “these horrors and butcheries” in India, of the “retrogression of civilization.” Just three years after the war in which he had struggled so hard to save Britain and its empire, Britain’s position in the world was slowly but steadily sinking away.

Just as Gandhi, from the confines of Birla House, saw his life’s work come unraveled before his eyes, so Churchill saw much the same thing happening from his stronghold at Chartwell. His five-and-a-half-year-old grandson remembered visiting him there in the mornings: “I would find him there tucked up in bed with a mountain of pillows behind him and a bedtable, cut out to accommodate the shape of his belly, piled high with papers in front of him.” A soggy cigar would already be in his mouth, and a secretary would be taking notes on a speech or letter. In those years Churchill had had a cinema built in the house, with two huge 35mm projectors, where he and visitors could watch favorites such as
Oliver Twist, Lady Hamilton,
and
Gone With the Wind,
while taking fifteen-minute breaks to refill their brandy glasses and “pump ship,” as Winston put it.
¹⁵

But underneath the visits and the fun lay a growing sense of darkness. More and more shadows were falling over the postwar world. Gandhi’s last words had been a warning: “It is a question whether the victors are really victors or victims.”
¹⁶
He might have been speaking directly about Great Britain. Once the most affluent nation in Europe, war had reduced it to an economic basket case, living on bread and potato rationing and loans from the Americans. Its people seemed to be sliding into apathy, and resentment at the cost of Britain’s global responsibilities, including its navy and empire.
¹⁷