Gandhi & Churchill (31 page)

The words impressed many Englishmen both in and out of the courtroom. One of them was the president of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill. Churchill, in fact, was so impressed that he later could quote Dhingra’s words from memory and said they were “the finest ever made in the name of patriotism.” Churchill predicted to his friend Wilfred Blunt that Dhingra “will be remembered 2000 years hence, as we remember Regulus and Spartacus and Plutarch’s heroes.”
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It became Gandhi’s life task to prove Churchill, and those who used violence in any cause, wrong.

In fact, the murder and trial could not have come at a worse time for Gandhi.
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He had returned to London to plead the South African Indians’ case once more, fresh from his second disastrous satyagraha campaign. And if in the summer of 1909 Winston Churchill’s views seemed assured and his future direction plain, Gandhi’s were more uncertain than ever.

After his release from prison in January 1908, and the failure of his registration act compromise in March, Gandhi had become distant from ordinary concerns, even from his family. His law practice remained as lucrative as ever, but Gandhi was cheerfully giving the money away or spending it on Phoenix Farm. His eldest son Harilal was now twenty. He still had no formal schooling but was active at Phoenix Farm and in the satyagraha movement. When Harilal was sentenced to jail for resisting registration and his father appeared as his lawyer, Gandhi’s main concern was that his son should get the maximum sentence. It was, after all, the kind of self-sacrifice he regularly asked of himself.
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In May 1908 Gandhi decided the government’s promises about loosening the registration law were worthless. After his dealings with Churchill and the Colonial Office, he would leave nothing to trust. The registration law was like a collar around a dog’s neck, as Gandhi liked to put it. All his efforts would now be devoted to breaking its choke hold.
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This time Gandhi spread the campaign into Natal with a missionary zeal that quickly caught fire. All at once he had a movement again. For the first time he was also using the term “satyagraha” to describe what he was doing, and he introduced a new protest tactic: burning the hated registration cards. In August, after Harilal was sentenced to prison, Gandhi organized a mass demonstration outside the Hamidia Mosque to watch more than thirteen hundred certificates being soaked in kerosene, set alight, and burned. The government had just passed a new, stiffer registration law, requiring the reregistration of all Indians, including fingerprinting. Gandhi gave a fierce speech denouncing it and exhorted the crowd “to suffer everything that may be necessary…because I expect this of my countrymen.”
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In October Gandhi was back in jail. His friend Reverend Doke watched as lines of passive resisters, handcuffed and guarded, were marched up the dusty road to Johannesburg prison. Gandhi himself stumbled along in prison uniform and manacles. “Keep absolutely firm to the end,” he wrote on his last day of freedom. “Suffering is our only remedy. Victory is certain.”
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More than fifteen hundred resisters were in prison as 1908 ended, most of them small traders and street hawkers. But Gandhi was running out of volunteers, and the movement out of steam. Every important resistance organizer was in jail facing three to six months of hard labor, Gandhi and his son included. As the deadline for reregistration neared, and merchants faced the prospect of losing their trading licenses, they began to defect, just as they had a year earlier. With a bitter sense of déjà vu, Gandhi learned in prison that “many [Indians] have given up the fight. Others, it appears, are about to do so.”
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By February 1909, 97 percent of Transvaal Asians had reregistered under the new law. Gandhi, however, would not quit. When the government released him, he immediately refused to register again and was rearrested. During this third spell in prison in a year, Gandhi learned that the British Indian Association was bankrupt and that “the people have been financially ruined.”
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When a small knot of well-wishers greeted him on his release on May 24, an exhausted Gandhi broke down and wept.

His second satyagraha campaign had been another failure. Other members of the BIA wanted him ousted as leader: in historian Maureen Swan’s words, “the vast majority of Transvaal Asians had emphatically repudiated passive resistance.” At a tense meeting in June the other BIA leaders discussed how to end the satyagraha campaign and whether to send another deputation to London to try one last time to make the Colonial Office see reason. Gandhi opposed the plan, saying, “The deputation only shows Indians’ weakness.”
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The other leaders insisted, however, and although their effort to make sure the deputation included
no
passive resisters (a blatant repudiation of Gandhi’s leadership) was defeated, Gandhi ended up heading the group by default. He was still the formal leader of the Transvaal Indian lobby, but he had virtually no followers and no support in the broader community.

So it was with a bitter sense of frustration that Gandhi arrived in London in July 1909, with little hope of success and even less idea of what would happen next. Oddly enough, the Wyllie murder helped him to get a fix on a new direction. If Gandhi was vague, during the eighteen weeks he spent in London, about what he was now fighting for, he could at least be clear about what and who he was fighting
against
.

The first of these enemies were men like Savarkar and the violent revolutionaries who had inspired Madan Lal Dhingra’s terrible deed. The second enemy was the nation that had put Dhingra to death, namely Great Britain. In 1909 Gandhi’s years of patient loyalism were finally over. The years of direct, uncompromising confrontation were about to begin.

Gandhi got his opportunity to confront his first enemy at a banquet at the Indian Catering Company in Bayswater in October. The event was a celebration of Dussehra, the festival commemorating Rama’s epic rescue of Queen Sita and victory over the demon king Ravana. Most of the guests were from India House, the hotbed of anti-British nationalism. The keynote speaker was Vinayak Savarkar himself.

An air of violence and death seemed to radiate from Savarkar and his gaunt, skull-like visage. He had already turned the backyard of India House into a bomb-making factory, complete with pots of explosive chemicals. Rumor had it that Savarkar had personally given Dhingra the revolver he used to kill Curzon Wyllie, uttering the words, “If you fail, do not show me your face again.”
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His brother Ganesh had just been arrested for sedition in India. In less than two months Savarkar would, not surprisingly, be arrested himself.

His belief in violent revolution and terrorist conspiracy was unapologetic: “Because you deny us a gun, we pick up a pistol…Because you deny us light, we gather in darkness to compass means to knock off the fetters that hold our Mother [India] down.” So was his contempt for Gandhi’s path of nonviolent resistance. “There can be no substitute for force to achieve complete freedom,” he wrote in 1907, “no matter how many little things can be got by other means…[Freedom] can be achieved by physical force alone.”
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Privately, Gandhi was seething when he arrived at the dinner. He was deeply distressed by Dhingra’s murderous act and the responsibility of “the stupid young men” like Savarkar who “seemed to glory in the deed.” The notion that murder and terror could bring Indians anything but more terror seemed to Gandhi pure insanity. As he wrote to Hermann Kallenbach, “Even if the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will then rule in their place? The murderers…India can gain nothing from the rule of murderers—no matter whether they are black or white.”
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But he also admitted, “I have met practically no one who believes India can ever be free without resort to violence.” The dinner was his first opportunity to offer publicly an alternative path.

In his Dussehra address Savarkar gave a fiery recital of how Rama slew the demon oppressor in order to establish his own heavenly kingdom on earth (the Rama Raj), and he recounted how the nine-day feast preceding Dussehra honored the bloodstained and terrible ten-armed goddess of vengeance Durga (usually represented riding a lion with a sword in each hand). But Gandhi sounded a very different note. His speech emphasized Rama’s role as the symbol of spiritual purity and virtue as well as of war and conquest, of “self restraint, unselfishness, patience, gentleness.” These qualities, Gandhi told his audience, “are the flowers which spring beneath the feet of those who accept, but refuse to impose, suffering.”

Yes, Indians would one day have to conquer the modern equivalent of the evil King Ravana, namely the unjust rule of the British. But they must do so as followers of Vishnu and his incarnation as the pure and blameless Rama, not as devotees of the bloodsoaked goddess Durga.
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It was an understated but crucial moment. By preaching nonviolence to the apostles of armed revolution, Gandhi was staking out his position in the Indian nationalist movement. That movement had begun without him and had grown without his input. In 1909 he was still only a spectator to its debates and controversies. But as Indians’ political hopes turned to violence for the first time since the Great Mutiny, Gandhi felt he could no longer sit on the sidelines.

His mother country was entering more and more in his thoughts. “The center of gravity is shifting to India,” he wrote to Polak in October, and not only as a way to bring additional pressure to bear on the South Africa problem. Contrary to myth, what prompted Gandhi to make himself a spokesman for the Indian nationalist movement was not disgust with British rule in India. It was his disgust with the growing militancy of Indian nationalism, which he saw as reckless and ultimately un-Indian. On October 8 he had given his first speech on the “Ethics of Passive Resistance,” in which he stated, “War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially a degrading thing.”
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In most respects, Gandhi was coming to see South Africa as a staging ground, a rehearsal, for greater things to come.

But first he had to deal with the frustration of petitioning once again a British government that seemed deaf to every reasonable appeal. He still wanted the 1907 registration law, which he had lobbied against the last time he was in London in 1906, repealed. New immigration restrictions, which limited new Indian residents to just six per year, had to go as well. He argued, “There must be legal equality with the whites,
it will not matter then if, in practice, not even a single Indian can get in
[my italics]. We can bear that.” This was no longer “a fight for the educated, or the highly educated, but for India’s honor, our self-respect.”
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Even with not one but two ex-viceroys at his side, Lord Ampthill
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and Lord Curzon himself, Gandhi got nowhere. He and Ampthill proposed to Colonial Secretary Lord Crewe a reasonable compromise: leave the six-per-year immigration limit up to the Transvaal governor’s discretion, instead of inscribing it in law. Crewe made agreeable noises; Gandhi’s hopes were briefly aroused. He even cabled back to Johannesburg: “
GOVERNMENT AGREE REPEAL
.”
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But then General Smuts, who was also in London, killed the deal. Lord Ampthill urged Gandhi to stay and keep trying. “Yours is a righteous struggle,” he kept telling Gandhi, “and you are fighting with clean weapons.”
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They met with the colonial secretary again on September 16. For seven weeks Gandhi waited for a response. On November 3 it arrived. Lord Crewe would do nothing.

Gandhi had reached his limit. To be sure, he had met new and interesting acquaintances during his stay in England. They included members of the London Passive Resistance Society, the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and George Allen, a Tolstoyan farmer.
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He had developed a genuine admiration and affection for Lord Ampthill, who seemed the embodiment of “courtesy and genuine humility.”

But as he prepared to leave, the bitterness of defeat spilled over into bitterness against England. He wrote an angry parting letter to the British press: “The only possible justification for holding together the different communities of the Empire under the same Sovereignty is the fact of elementary equality.” That principle of equality had been enshrined for Indians for half a century in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. The Transvaal legislation cut at its very heart. By allowing the law to stand, Gandhi stated, “the Imperial Government are a party to the crime against the Imperial Constitution.” As for Indians in India, he wrote in a letter to the Bombay newspaper the
Gujarati,
“If the doctrine of the Transvaal Government be true, the people of India cease to be partners in the empire.” The letter ended on a plaintive note: “Will not India come to the rescue?”
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But how could it? Gandhi asked himself that question as he packed his bags. The next day he would be traveling more than eight thousand miles, back to a movement that was in a state of collapse, and arrive empty-handed. How could Mother India protect her children, when India herself was in the grip of the same regime that denied Indians their rights in South Africa?

Two recently published pieces offered Gandhi tantalizing clues to an answer. One was written by an Englishman. In the wake of the Wyllie murder, the
Illustrated London News
had run a piece on Indian nationalism by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was one of Henry Salt’s old friends and a fierce critic of modern capitalist civilization, but from the Right not the Left. It took a Roman Catholic self-described reactionary to put Gandhi’s fondest thoughts into words. Chesterton suggested that the real problem with revolutionaries like Savarkar was that their view of India’s future “is not very Indian.” Indian nationalists liked to talk about revolutions, parliaments, constitutions, budgets, and balance of payments. But these were
Western
models of human progress, Chesterton pointed out. (In fact, one of Savarkar’s most important role models was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.) These notions had nothing to do with India’s own cultural and spiritual heritage. “If there is such a thing as India,” Chesterton said, “it has a right to be Indian”—not an empty vessel to be filled by Western notions.
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