Gandhi & Churchill (28 page)

The delegation also included ex-Indian civil servants like Sir Henry Cotton and even Sir Lepel Griffin, who had been Randolph Churchill’s mentor on Indian affairs and was a hard-liner opposing Indian self-rule. But the treatment of Indians in the Transvaal, he told everyone, resembled imperial Russia’s vicious pogroms against the Jews. Such behavior was “unheard of under the British flag,” he said. Indians were “the most orderly, honorable, industrious, temperate race in the world,” Griffin added, and since they were descendants of the ancient Aryans, they were “people of our own stock and blood.” Surely they deserved better.
¹

Griffin spoke those words when the delegation met Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin at his Downing Street offices on Thursday, November 8. Naoroji had suggested that the delegation be headed by a white man, Lepel Griffin, rather than an Indian; in fact the delegation consisted of seven whites and five Indians, only one of whom was a Hindu, Gandhi himself.
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They were the respectable “civilized” face of India: men in dark frock coats with gold watches, gloves, and canes, flanked by their equally respectable white patrons—protectors, almost. The average age of the delegation members (excluding Gandhi and Ali) was sixty-three. Dignity, wisdom, and self-restraint were engraved in every lined face and gray whisker.
²

Their plea had earlier won the full support of Secretary of State for India John Morley, although he stressed he had no power over the Colonial Office. It got a much more cautious response from Lord Elgin, who had expressed doubts about meeting the delegation at all.
³
Gandhi nonetheless wrote to Henry Polak that the interview had been “exceedingly good” and that theirs was certainly the biggest and most impressive delegation ever assembled on any Indian cause.

Exactly a week later Gandhi sent a letter to the colonial undersecretary, Winston Churchill:

Mr Ally and I who have come as a Deputation from the Transvaal on behalf of the British Indians, venture to request an appointment with you in order to enable us to place the British Indian position in the Transvaal before you. We shall be extremely obliged if you could spare a short time to enable us to wait on you.

Your humble servant,
M. K. Gandhi

The two met on November 28, only a few days before Gandhi had to return to South Africa.
⁴

Churchill, two days shy of his thirty-second birthday, gazed across his desk at a slim, urbane man with a low intense voice, dark-skinned from the South African sun, wearing a well-pressed suit and a small mustache. A lawyer trained in the Inner Temple, Gandhi was a Boer War veteran like himself, their paths having crossed only minutes apart on the battlefield at Spion Kop.

Gandhi and his Muslim companion told Churchill that they were first of all loyal British subjects. They understood that the white man was in charge in the Transvaal. However, “we do feel that we are entitled to all the other ordinary rights as that a British subject should enjoy.”

Churchill interrupted them. “If the British government refuses to give its assent to the registration ordinance, what then?” he asked. “Surely the new government in the Transvaal will pass an even more restrictive law.”

“No law can be worse than the present law,” Gandhi replied, adding, “the future can take care of itself.” Churchill promised to do what he could, and the meeting ended on a friendly note.
⁵

Churchill would have been impressed, as other observers were, by “Mr. Gandhi’s marshaling of the facts” and his “skilled as well as a determined hand” in negotiations.
⁶
Churchill’s warning about what the Transvaal legislature might do under the new constitution that Churchill himself had unveiled to Parliament in March did not trouble Gandhi. The day before a caucus of Liberal MPs had met with Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who said he “did not approve of the ordinance and would speak to Lord Elgin.” Surely victory lay within their grasp.

As Gandhi prepared to leave on Friday, December 1, everyone agreed the delegation had been a great success. The
Rand Daily Mail
told readers that Gandhi had “made a deep impression on political and other circles here.” He and Mr. Ali “came, saw…and conquered.” After his meeting with Churchill, Gandhi told the
Times
that “this week will abide in our memory forever.” He sent a letter to the newspaper the day of his departure, adding, “The lesson we have drawn is that we may rely upon the British sense of fair play and justice.”
⁷

On the way home their ship docked at Madeira, where Gandhi and Ali received cables from both London and Johannesburg. Winston Churchill had announced in the House of Commons that Lord Elgin would refuse his assent to the Black Act. Gandhi was ecstatic. “This [is] more than we hoped for,” he exclaimed. “But God’s ways are inscrutable. Well-directed efforts yield appropriate fruit.”
⁸
For the rest of the voyage Gandhi and Ali planned their campaign to win the next round of battle over Indian grievances.

The friends who greeted them when they reached Johannesburg, however, were not smiling; their mood was somber and gloomy. Someone pointed out that nowhere in his speech had Churchill said that the Crown would block a registration law passed by a
new
Transvaal legislature under the new British-approved constitution.
⁹
And in a few months that was exactly what happened. On January 1, 1907, the Transvaal was granted self-government. White legislative candidates assured voters that the British government would now approve the fingerprinting and registering of all Asians. And on March 21, 1907, the Black Act became law in the Transvaal.
¹⁰

“Our disappointment in South Africa was as deep as had been our joy in Madeira,” Gandhi later remembered.
¹¹
He and Ali and everyone else assumed they had been tricked by Churchill and the Colonial Office, who wanted to appease white opinion at the expense of the Indians. However, Churchill had told him the truth—it was just not the whole truth.

The fact was that even before he met Gandhi, Churchill and his colleagues had decided they would have to grant the Transvaal the power to force Indians to register, even though they would disallow the old law in order to keep up imperial appearances. When the permanent undersecretary wrote a memo on November 3 describing their predicament, Churchill wrote at the bottom: “I agree entirely. We are in a wholly indefensible position. [Gandhi’s] deputation will certainly stir up difficulties in the House of Commons. What can we say, after what we said to Kruger [the Transvaal president]” about the Boers being able to enact their own laws, no matter how offensive.

Churchill concluded, “The new [Transvaal] Parliament may shoulder the burden” of offending British opinion by upholding the Black Act. “Why should we?” When someone asked what to do about the delegation and its supporters, Winston scribbled: “Dawdle.”
¹²

That was what he did when he met Gandhi, while slyly revealing his hand. The decision to disallow the law had been made almost three weeks before they met. Even the British governor-general of the Transvaal did not know the truth until November 27, and Churchill’s speech in the Commons a week later was artfully crafted to evade the storm to come.

To Gandhi, it was a “crooked policy.” He added, “I believe it could be given a still harsher name with perfect justice,” namely fraud.
¹³
But to Churchill, it was a sensible compromise. A Liberal government that undercut the Boers’ right to self-rule would, Churchill felt, undercut the whole fabric of British rule in South Africa.

Indeed, earlier that spring Churchill had shepherded the new constitutions for the Transvaal and the Orange Free State through Parliament. Both documents were undeniably liberal in their principles and aspirations. They embodied the principle that the prime minister himself had enunciated: “A good government is no substitute for self-government” (except of course in India).
¹⁴
The new constitutions granted universal manhood suffrage for whites, which Britain itself still lacked. Even the question of female suffrage, still a New Ager’s pipe dream in England, was left open. “We are prepared,” Winston told the Commons, “to make this settlement in the name of the Liberal Party” in order to step forward “into the sunshine of a more gentle and a more generous age.”
¹⁵
As for Gandhi’s Indians, like the poor black Natal woman who had to walk 160 miles for justice, Churchill had to leave them in the shadows. Unlike South Africa’s whites, they failed to meet the standard of “Imperial importance” that Churchill had raised in his own mind. It was that standard he adhered to ever after.

To save the British Empire, Churchill would strike deals with South African racists; with Labour radicals; with American isolationists; even with the devil himself, Joseph Stalin. And anyone who dared to stand in Churchill’s way would be ruthlessly, even callously, dealt with. Gandhi was the first to learn that lesson in 1906. The world would learn it many times over in the next forty years.

Gandhi, of course, saw things very differently. To his mind Winston Churchill and his Colonial Office colleagues had revealed that “British fair play and justice” was a joke. Gandhi would no longer be interested in promises, only results. The old ways of doing things, with petitions and respectful delegations, had failed. If Indians were going to get what they needed and wanted, Gandhi decided, they must have a new kind of political movement built on new principles. Above all, it would be based on the new idea he had been pushing on his colleagues since September that of passive resistance or, as he preferred to call it,
satyagraha.

Was satyagraha really new? In retrospect, the 1907 satyagraha campaign that Gandhi launched after his meeting with Churchill was an earth-shaking event. It would have a dramatic impact not only on India and South Africa but on the civil rights movement in the United States and on every other group that would later invoke the term “civil disobedience.”
¹⁶
Yet Gandhi’s autobiography, and even his retrospective account of those years,
Satyagraha in South Africa,
are unclear about how he came up with the idea, almost deliberately so.
¹⁷

Gandhi himself and many Gandhi scholars emphasize satyagraha’s roots in Hindu and Jainist traditions of nonviolence or
ahimsa
. Certainly many of the tactics Gandhi employed, like the peaceful collective strikes or
hartals,
had been used to protest the partition of Bengal. One scholar has even seen Gandhi’s civil disobedience as having hometown roots, in the traditional Kathiawar practice of “sitting
dharna,
” or fasting and sitting outside a ruler’s palace in order to rouse his attention and compassion.
¹⁸

Others have stressed the Western influence. A. L. Herman and Martin Green have charted the influence on Gandhi of Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau.
¹⁹
James Hunt has pointed to the 1902 campaign by non-Anglican Protestant churches against the Education Act, which included the mass refusal to pay taxes at the cost of going to prison and which made a strong impression on Gandhi. The campaign’s organizers even used the term “passive resistance.” Four days after the Empire Theater meeting, Henry Polak even recommended the Education Act resistance campaign to Gandhi as a “historic parallel” for organizing resistance to the Black Act.
²⁰

Gandhi had also been impressed by Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragette movement, which had been very active in London when he was visiting Churchill in 1906.
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The cause appealed to the New Age conscience, and many suffragettes had willingly gone to jail. Their heroic refusal to back down before the awesome power of the law, even in the face of coercion, moved him to write an article for
Indian Opinion
on the movement. It concluded: “If even women display such courage, will the Transvaal Indians fail in their duty and be afraid of jail?”
²¹

Gandhi studied the suffragette protests for more than a year before he read Henry David Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience
.
²²
However, those protests, like Thoreau’s experience of being put in jail in protest of a war he considered unjust, were only examples for Gandhi of
how
passive resistance might work, not the original inspiration. For in the end, whatever blend of Hindu, Nonconformist, and New Age radical ideas were in the air, Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent mass action as a moral as well as political force was uniquely his own. To his mind, satyagraha embodied his fundamental belief that spiritual and moral forces, not material or self-interested ones, ruled the world. Churchill’s dictum that “larger views must prevail over small ideas” was one that Gandhi whole-heartedly endorsed. It was the nature of the visions that each man was determined to make prevail that drove them apart.

For Gandhi, nonviolent resistance was a means to a greater end than mere politics. It was the path to man’s highest religious truth and embodied the highest spiritual principles. Those who chose that path, therefore, must be disciplined, Gandhi believed. They had to be pure in thought and deed and prepared for self-sacrifice, even death, as his Indian ambulance drivers had been. “The English honor only those who make such sacrifice,” he warned his readers even before he left for London. In fighting the Black Act, Indians had a chance “for showing their mettle” just as they had at Spion Kop, but for a higher purpose. On October 6, 1906, the very day he left for London, he had described the decision to go to jail rather than submit to injustice as “a
sacred act,
and only by doing so, can the Indian community maintain its honor” (my italics). Honor, duty, cheerful self-sacrifice: this was the masculine, almost soldierly, ethos that Gandhi wanted his version of passive resistance to express.
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