Gandhi & Churchill (35 page)

Since January Gandhi had been planning to leave South Africa for India. He had closed Tolstoy Farm and moved everyone south to Phoenix Farm. He was only waiting for the announcement of a final amnesty for his satyagrahis before he bought the steamship tickets for his family. But then came the marriage ruling. The British Indian Association called a mass meeting on March 30, and Gandhi wrote a stern rebuke to the minister of the interior. On April 9 he saw the final wording of the latest immigration bill, and his worst fears were realized. It tightened rules not only on immigration from India but on immigration from one province of South Africa to another, even for Indians born there. In effect, the law made South Africa’s Indians prisoners in their own country.

Gandhi spent May and June preparing the next, his fourth, satyagraha campaign. But this time he had a new approach. On either June 23 or 24, 1913, he wrote to Hermann Kallenbach: “I am resolving in my own mind the idea of doing something for the indentured man.”
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Indentured workers had come from India since 1860, until the 1911 law closed the door on them. Having signed three-year contracts to provide indentured labor, they worked on the sugar plantations, the upcountry farms, and by the 1890s the factories and mines that drove Natal’s economy. Still others worked as servants in the homes of Gandhi’s wealthy Indian friends. The “indentured man” made up the bulk of South Africa’s Indian population. Gandhi knew next to nothing about them: even though Phoenix Farm was in the heart of Natal’s sugar country, he had never visited any of the plantations or the labor compounds where indentured Indians lived in appalling filth and squalor.
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After all, few of them were Gujaratis. Most were Tamil-speakers, and almost 60 percent of the agricultural laborers were either
shudras
or untouchables.
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Gandhi had met some of them as volunteers during his ambulance service and seen something of their lives during his plague relief efforts in Johannesburg in 1904. Yet as Maureen Swan has recounted, for years he had convinced himself that they were happy with their lot as landless laborers and debtors to Natal’s Indian merchant elite. Still, the annual £3 tax imposed on every Indian who had been indentured since 1895, plus the £1 head tax imposed by the white government after the Boer War, drove many of them back into debt servitude and threatened their children with the same fate.
³³

If any Indians truly suffered under the white South African regime, it was not Gandhi’s friends but the indentured underclass and their children. But he had ignored them for almost two decades. During his visit Gokhale had spoken of the need for Indians to rally to oppose the hated tax. Now Gandhi realized that this might be the issue to mobilize a true groundswell of support and breathe new life into the movement he had nearly killed off.

Up until then Gandhi had thought and spoken of satyagraha as an
elite
movement, made up of individuals willing to make almost superhuman self-sacrifices, risking their fortunes and lives for their own honor and that of their fellow “respectable” Indians. In 1913 he began to think of satyagraha as a
mass
movement, with mass appeal. By mobilizing all Indians, including society’s poorest and most vulnerable, Gandhi realized, he could transform them as well as his movement.

As his campaign got under way in September, he still preferred to use his satyagrahis, including his own family, as the vanguard. When President Smuts did not respond to his call to end the tax and overturn the marriage ruling, he sent a contingent of women from well-to-do families, including Kasturbai and his white secretary Sonja Schlesin, along with Gandhi’s Tamili friend Thambai Naidu and Hermann Kallenbach, to break the immigration law by crossing from Natal into Transvaal. They were all arrested, and Kasturbai and the other women were sentenced to three months’ hard labor.
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But when on October 15, 1913, Gandhi called for a strike by indentured laborers against the £3 tax, he was stunned at the response. Already skeptics in the British Indian Association were calling the confrontational satyagraha campaign a waste of time. Across South Africa the total number of passive resisters came to less than forty. Fistfights broke out at a meeting on October 12, and Gandhi had to promise that he would take a more conciliatory, and conventional, approach to lobbying against the proposed law.
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The strike call was a “last ditch stand” against his critics, who had seen him fail once too often. It was “a tactic he was so ill-prepared to use that he was uncertain how successful it would be.”
³⁶

Miraculously the next day, October 16, the strike began in the coal fields of northern Natal. The Indian workers there had never struck before. Most had no idea what a strike was. But the rebellion against the £3 tax caught fire in the labor compounds. Within two weeks more than five thousand mine workers had downed tools. Gandhi’s success came just in time. On the nineteenth there had been a formal vote of no confidence against him in the BIA, which lost. Gandhi was now poised to capitalize on his unexpected success.

On October 17 Gandhi headed for the mining camps at Newcastle. He wrote excitedly to Kallenbach, “The strike is a real thing. It is now making itself felt.”
³⁷
When the mine owners cut off electricity and water, he urged the miners “to go forth like pilgrims” and risk arrest for violating the law for interprovince migration. On October 29 he led the first batch of strikers and their families from Newcastle toward the Transvaal. A day later Thambai Naidu led a second batch; the secretary of a new organization, the Colonial Born Indian Association or CBIA, representing South African–born Indians, led the third.
³⁸

They established a shanty camp a few miles from the Transvaal border, which a Tamil Christian dubbed Camp Lazarus, after the man whom Christ miraculously raised from the dead—not an inappropriate image for Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. As October ended, Gandhi had gathered together more than two thousand men and 180 women and children at Camp Lazarus. All were living on barely a pound and a half of bread and an ounce of sugar a day. After a week Gandhi told them they must decamp and travel light, that they were not to touch any private property, and that if they were arrested as they crossed the border, they were not to resist.
³⁹

On November 6, on Gandhi’s command, they set out at dawn in a long line. Gandhi always liked to think of himself as a general leading his satyagrahi troops into battle: a battle of soul force and
ahimsa
but a battle nonetheless.
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He had cast himself as a warrior in the tradition of the
Gita
and deeply admired the soldierly ethos. The discipline of regular British Army regiments that he had seen in the Boer War, with their “clockwork regularity” in breaking up camp or going into action, was, he had told the
Times of India,
“wonderful to see.” Later he spoke of the “rich experience we gained at the front” and would say of military life, “How many proud, rude, savage spirits has it not broken into gentle creatures of God?”
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Nor did he shirk the cost of war, even
his
kind of war, in bloodshed, any more than Winston Churchill did. “I do not know what evil is in me,” he confessed in a letter from April 1914. “I have a strain of cruelty in me…such that people force themselves to do things, even to attempt impossible things, in order to please me.”
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Later, English officials would be shocked to hear Gandhi talk coolly of the number of deaths that would result if they did not accede to his demands and riots or communal strife broke out in some Indian city.

“If a man with God’s name on his tongue and a sword under his armpit deserved to be called Mahatma,” one of his bitterest Indian opponents would say later, “then Gandhi was one.”
⁴³
But like an Old Testament Joshua or David, he refused to spare himself in the cost. As he led his “troops” on the march on November 6, he fully expected to be arrested, beaten, and perhaps even shot down as they approached the border.

The police did nothing. Back in Johannesburg, Interior Minister General Smuts was playing a shrewd waiting game. He believed that the coal strike, indeed Gandhi’s whole campaign, would collapse without the police having to lift a finger. “Mr. Gandhi appeared to be in a position of much difficulty,” Smuts wrote later. “Like Frankenstein he found his monster an uncomfortable creation and he would be glad to be relieved of any further responsibility.”
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Smuts was almost right. By refusing to arrest the miners as they crossed the border, the South African police put Gandhi in a terrible position. He was responsible for the lives of two thousand people, who had no food or water or shelter. Almost £250 a day were needed to keep them alive, and Gandhi had no funds. By the first week of November, even before they left Camp Lazarus, the government’s non-intervention policy “seriously threatened the success of the strike.”
⁴⁵
Now his gesture in leading his people across the border, like Moses leading his people to the promised land, seemed an empty, even ludicrous gesture.

Finally, at Palmford, the police struck—but only by arresting Gandhi. He was livid. He wrote a reproachful letter to Smuts, saying his detention left his marchers “on starvation rations without provision for shelter” or any idea of what they were to do next.
⁴⁶
Gandhi had been praying to be arrested, but not alone. He had envisioned thousands of martyrs, not just their leader, suffering and even dying for satyagraha. His options were shrinking. Once he was released, he immediately broke the law again, and on November 9 he was rearrested, along with Polak and Kallenbach. Gandhi received a sentence of three months’ hard labor. The rest of his bedraggled army, hungry and leaderless, were quietly rounded up and sent back to the mines. Gandhi had lost again.

But then the strikers saved him. Back at the mines the returned Indian miners refused to work and encouraged their coworkers to do the same. Meanwhile the strike was spreading to southern Natal and the coastal sugar plantations. No one organized the miners; most had still never heard of Gandhi. Some indentured laborers left for the cities. Others drifted to Phoenix Farm. Some had heard rumors that a great raja would pay them three pounds not to work. Others said that the great Gokhale would return with a mighty army to abolish the hated tax. But all of them refused to cut cane.
⁴⁷

At the end of November more than 50,000 laborers were on strike, and some 7,000 Indians were in jail. The strike paralyzed the Durban and Pietermaritzburg produce markets. Some sugar mills had to close down, and local hotels and resorts had lost all their Indian help.
⁴⁸
In Ladysmith workers rioted, and mounted police had to charge with batons. Some strikers were shot dead; others were wounded; in the mining camps miners and police battled, and by the second week in December the death toll rose to ten.

The strike was having its effect on opinion overseas, especially British and Indian opinion. Gokhale, who had thought Gandhi was making a mistake in calling the strike, was now demanding a commission of inquiry into the deaths. The Viceroy Lord Hardinge spoke of India’s “deep and burning sympathy” for the Indian laborers in South Africa. “This movement of passive resistance has been dealt with by measures which would not for one moment be tolerated by any country that calls itself civilized.” The governor of Bombay expressed similar sentiments; the press in Britain and other countries lined up clearly on the side of the Indian strikers.
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The turn of public opinion, and the threat of more violence, finally forced General Smuts to the bargaining table. On December 9, 1913, Gandhi was released from prison. He was barefoot, in coolie dress with a homespun white coat and flowing dhoti, and his mustache was shaved off. He was in mourning, he said, for the ten workers killed in the strike. He was asked if he felt responsible for their deaths.

“How glorious,” he replied, “it would have been if one of those bullets had struck me!”
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But Gandhi’s death would have left a vacuum, and no one else was up to the task of power negotiations with Jan Christiaan Smuts.

General Smuts, minister of the interior as well as defense, was white South Africa’s shrewdest politician. Largely forgotten today, he was for nearly forty years one of the world’s most highly regarded statesmen. He was no racist of the Boer stereotype, as Gandhi knew.
^*46
When they first met, Smuts had told him, “I could never entertain a dislike for your people. You know I am a barrister. I had some Indian fellow students in my time. But I must do my duty”—precisely the word Gandhi himself might have used, if he had been in the same position.

“You are a simple-living and frugal race, in many respects more intelligent than we are,” Smut told Gandhi. “You belong to a civilization that is thousands of years old. Ours, as you say, is but an experiment. Who knows but that the whole damn thing will perish before long. But you see,” he added pointedly, “why we do not want you here.” As with Gandhi, the issue in Smuts’s mind was “simply one of preserving one’s own civilization.”
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In Smuts’s case, that meant keeping South Africa’s Indians down and out, which he had been doing for five years with reasonable success—with Gandhi on the losing end.

But now, as they met in January, Gandhi had more leverage than before. The indentured laborers’ strike had revealed his political muscle, including his influence in India, where Calcutta had announced it was launching a full inquiry on the status of Indians in South Africa. “[Gandhi’s] activities at that time were very trying to me,” Smuts wrote later. While Gandhi had been enjoying “a period of rest and quiet in jail” (Gandhi, who had been pushed to the brink of exhaustion, had to admit that that was true), Smuts had the “odium of carrying out a law which had not strong public support.”
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