Gandhi & Churchill (33 page)

Its censors read
Hind Swaraj
and decided that if it was not actually seditious, it was clearly subversive of British supremacy. If Gandhi’s calls for noncooperation were heeded, the Bombay government’s Gujarati translator warned, it would lead to “systematic strikes” in India’s public works, railways, and post offices and paralyze the government (exactly what would happen in twenty years). “The sooner [
Hind Swaraj
] is suppressed,” he concluded, “the better.”
⁴⁶

At least one man in England agreed with the censors: Winston Churchill. The man who would become Gandhi’s most implacable adversary had already guessed the shape of things to come. On September 5, weeks before Gandhi finished
Hind Swaraj,
the young home secretary predicted with uncanny foresight what would happen if Gandhi’s program of noncooperation were ever put in place.

“The game would be up,” he frankly told Wilfred Blunt. “If [Indians] could agree to have nothing at all to do with us, the whole thing would collapse,” meaning the Raj. Churchill could afford to admire a figure like Dhingra or even Savarkar because they were ultimately powerless. Violence and armed force, even insurrection, were something the British knew how to deal with. Noncooperation on a massive scale was something else again. Even in 1909 Winston Churchill realized that saving the British Empire in India meant halting a visionary like Gandhi in his tracks.
⁴⁷

As for Gandhi, he was furious when he learned that his book was banned in India. He still insisted that he was a loyal subject of the empire, except that “my notion of loyalty does not involve acceptance of current rules or government irrespective of its righteousness or otherwise.” He was also upset when a South African Theosophist, W. J. Wybergh, spoke out against
Hind Swaraj
as a formula for anarchy. “To destroy” laws and police and government “and put nothing in their place,” Wybergh said, “is simply to destroy the possibility of all advance…It is a fatal conclusion to suppose that what is right for the saint is right for everyone else.”
⁴⁸

But for Gandhi, modern society was already anarchy—spiritual anarchy. Wybergh’s argument, he wrote, presupposed that ordinary public life and religious principles could be kept separate: that what was intolerable in one (violence, coercion, greed) should be tolerated in the other: “That is what we see in everyday life under modern conditions.” Passive resistance, by contrast, reconnected religion and politics “by testing every one of our actions in the light of ethical principles.” It empowered moral persons to end suffering and resist unjust laws. This was why, Gandhi believed, “passive resistance, that is soul force, is matchless” and must prevail in the end.
⁴⁹

As for the dangers involved in such a radical experiment, Gandhi had already given the answer in
Hind Swaraj
. “I would paraphrase the thought of an English divine and say that anarchy under home rule were better than order under foreign rule”—words that would haunt him later.
^*43

Gandhi sent a copy of
Hind Swaraj
to his new mentor, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote a courteous reply on May 3, 1910. He at least understood Gandhi’s New Age message. Now ill and infirm, Tolstoy agreed that passive resistance was “a question of the greatest importance not only for India but for the whole of humanity.” Later he added, “Your work in the Transvaal…[is]…most important and fundamental.” It was the last long letter Tolstoy ever wrote. Less than two months later he was dead. Gandhi wrote his obituary in
Indian Opinion,
calling Tolstoy “one of the greatest men of our age.”
⁵⁰

In tribute, Gandhi established a second experimental farm close to Johannesburg that he dubbed Tolstoy Farm. There Gandhi finally made his home, hewing wood, drawing water, doing laundry, and helping to build new houses with gusto. “I am now a farmer,” he wrote proudly to Manilal and his other sons, “and I wish you to become farmers.” Tolstoy Farm would be the center of his activities for the rest of his stay in South Africa.

Because he was still in South Africa. While
Hind Swaraj
marked a major turning point for Gandhi’s life and his theory of nonviolence, the facts on the ground remained unchanged. He had returned from England to a movement devoid of followers and money, even after Henry Polak’s money-raising tour of India in 1909–10.
⁵¹
Even Governor Smuts and the Transvaal government saw him more as a useful symbol, a canny lawyer willing to cut deals in the name of South Africa’s Indians, than as a leader of a movement.

For all of 1910 and the start of 1911 Gandhi’s third satyagraha campaign existed in name only. In April he and Smuts reached another agreement on the immigration rules, couched in vague phrases and ambiguities that either man could cast as a victory. “Smuts mistrusted Gandhi,” historian Maureen Swan notes, “as much as Gandhi mistrusted Smuts.”
⁵²
Neither side was interested in pushing the issue, however. Certainly Gandhi was unwilling to renew the battle until he had found a way to breathe new life into his movement and finally turn soul force into a political force.

Chapter Ten

PARTING OF THE WAYS

1911–1914

What is the destiny of our country to be?

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1910

How despicable my countrymen are!

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1912

A
T
10:45
ON THE MORNING OF
January 3, 1911, a Sunday, Winston Churchill was lolling in his bath when the phone rang. Some of the most important moments in Churchill’s life seem to have happened when he was either in bed or in the bathtub. This was one of them.

He came to the apparatus “dripping wet and shrouded in a towel.”
¹
It was the London Metropolitan Police. They had trapped a gang of terrorists in a house in London’s East End at Sidney Street. These were not Indian terrorists or even Irishmen but Latvians. They were part of a burglary ring with vague connections to the rising tide of anarchist gangs working in Europe and Russia. They had been hiding out in the slums of Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper had terrorized London citizenry almost a quarter-century earlier (when Gandhi had been a lonely law student at Inner Temple and Winston a lonely schoolboy at Harrow).

Two weeks earlier the gang had been surprised in a robbery attempt and had shot three constables, killing two. Now on January 3 members of the gang were firing on police from the Sidney Street house. Since Churchill was home secretary, the police needed his permission to call in backup. Churchill told them to call in not only the Scots Guards but the Royal Artillery. He also said he would go down there himself.

Minutes later he was dressed and striding out the door. At thirty-six, he was the Liberals’ rising star. In just two years he had gone from being a minor undersecretary to a major player in Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s cabinet. Yet beneath the facade of parliamentary politician, the officer of the Fourth Hussars still lurked. The temptation to see and hear some shots in action, even in the streets of London, was too much for him to resist.

Winston arrived to find the police and Scots Guards blazing away at the house with a large field artillery piece at the ready. He immediately took charge, as a crowd of onlookers gathered.
^*44
Later newspaper photos and newsreels would show him, pale and cherubically grim-faced in an astrakhan-collared overcoat and topcoat, directing the gunfire like a general on the battlefield. Soon smoke began to pour from inside the house. The rain of police and army bullets had set the hideout on fire, but Churchill refused to let the fire brigade put out the conflagration, for fear they might be shot at. For over an hour the house was allowed to burn. When the firemen and police finally charged in, they found only two bodies, charred beyond recognition. It was never clear whether they were anarchists or burglars, or even whether their ringleader, the sinister “Peter the Painter,” really existed.
²

The “Siege of Sidney Street,” as it became known, drew a firestorm of criticism and ridicule on the home secretary. The Tories found his insistence on personally taking charge and his mock-heroics laughable. His fellow Liberals accused him of using a “steam hammer to crack a nut.” A. G. Gardiner in the
Daily News
said it was one more example of Winston’s “tendency to exaggerate a situation” and his taste for hysterical dramatics. “He is always unconsciously playing a part, an heroic part,” Gardiner wrote. “And he is himself his most astonished spectator.”
³

Churchill was unrepentant. He believed he had struck a blow for public order, even for the British race. “I thought it better to let the house burn,” he told Asquith in an explanatory letter, “than spend good British lives in rescuing these ferocious rascals.”
⁴
He believed those “ferocious rascals” represented the new threat to his stable world: socialist revolution.

Churchill may have become a self-declared Radical, but he had no sympathy for socialist ideas, or for the party that claimed to represent them, the rising Labour Party. “Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be,” he would explain to his constituents. “Socialism seeks to pull down wealth, Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty…Socialism would kill enterprise; liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.”
⁵
Churchill believed in helping the poor and was willing to do his bit to free them from privilege’s trammels, like backing the 1910 bill that had stripped the House of Lords of the power to veto legislation. But the ideas of dictatorship of the proletariat and class warfare horrified him, as well they might horrify the cousin of one of England’s greatest peers, the Duke of Marlborough.
⁶

Socialist ideas also horrified Gandhi. It is striking that neither man was drawn to them, then or later. Even during his early years in London Gandhi had shown no interest in the radical-left politics of many of his New Age friends. Marx’s materialism naturally repelled him. Communists and socialists seemed to want to lead mankind down the same spiritual dead end as capitalism. Socialism on the Marxist model, he believed, “reeked of violence.” It seemed to him part of the same disease afflicting Indian nationalism. “‘Kill, kill, kill,’ that is all they want,” he wrote in
Indian Opinion
in September 1909 in the shadow of the Curzon Wyllie murder. “If this is the way things go on, no one’s life will be safe in Europe.”
⁷

In Churchill’s case, however, the repulsion was more visceral, not to mention self-interested. An anarchist like Peter the Painter seemed to him the enemy of decency and order, of the “English way of life,” even the basic codes of human conduct. His reaction to anarchists and socialists foreshadowed his hatred of the Russian Revolution and Communism, and his antipathy to revolution of any kind, including Gandhi’s kind. The Churchill who would fight Indian independence with all his strength in 1931 and again during the Second World War, first surfaced with “the little general” of the Siege of Sidney Street.

Then over the summer of 1911, as Britain’s economy began to turn sour, a bitter seamen and dockworkers’ strike broke out. A national railway strike in sympathy seemed certain. The previous year, when a coal workers’ strike became ugly and policemen were stoned, the young home secretary had refused to employ troops. After Sidney Street, however, he had no hesitation and not only used troops but gave them powers amounting to martial law. Charles Masterman was appalled as his young friend declared virtual martial law around the country, imperiously directing troops to points on the map. He seriously believed Winston was longing for bloodshed. When Lloyd George managed to settle the strike, Churchill was disappointed: “I would have been better to have gone on and given these men a good thrashing.”
⁸

These were callous words in retrospect, but at the time Churchill truly believed that the future of the country was at stake. As the twentieth century entered its second decade, he already had the alarming sense that things were coming unstuck. The liberal optimism that had pushed him to the Radical ranks had curdled. The imperial order of his youth was passing into disorder, from the rise of nationalist violence in Ireland and anarchist violence in Europe to the riots against partition in Bengal. All this was made worse by the growing tensions among the major continental European powers. “A strong tremor of unrest has passed through the gigantic structure of fleets and armies which impress and oppress the civilization of our time,” he told his constituents in Dundee in October of that year, when full-scale war between France and Germany over Morocco had narrowly been averted.
⁹

Churchill, like other astute observers at the time, was aware of the growing interconnectivity of the world’s societies and economies. Globalization and its dangers was as hot a topic then as it is today. The concerns it generated are reflected in best sellers like H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
(1898) and
Anticipations
(1901), while G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday
(1907) and John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915) explored the vulnerability of civilization to new internal as well as external threats. A railway strike might bring Britain to the brink of starvation within weeks, Churchill worried, since its great cities all had to feed themselves on rail lines connected by sea to economic networks reaching around the globe. “We are an artificial country,” he warned.
¹⁰
Britain could not survive without international trade. Nor could the other industrialized countries, yet they were busy arming themselves to the teeth.